AMOT’s Museums and Heritage Coordinator, Dr Andrew Bamford, provides some introductory research tips.
The Regimental and Corps Museums within the AMOT network hold a wealth of information about the men and women who served in the British Army. If you know the Regiment or Corps which is associated with your research, we recommend that you contact the relevant museum. Contact information for museum can be found in the AMOT Museum Directory (https://www.armymuseums.org.uk/museum-directory/). Please be aware that some museums will charge for research, while others will answer basic enquiries for free (though a donation is always welcome).
The more information that you are able to obtain before contacting a museum, the more likely that they are to be able to help you – do you have a service number? A date range of service? A sub-unit (i.e. a battalion of an infantry regiment, or an artillery battery)? These sorts of things will help staff at the museum help pin down the right individual, and are likely to be included as part of any personal paperwork that might have survived. In the example paperwork here, which belonged to the writer’s grandfather, see the service number and regiment ringed, along with relevant dates.
If you don’t know what part of the Army the soldier that you are researching served in, don’t assume that men always served in their local regiment. Particularly during the world wars, men were drafted where they were needed; before the reforms of late-nineteenth century, few regiments had more than a notional relationship to the county whose name they bore, and recruited throughout the British Isles. Here you might need to do some detective work, if, say, you have a photograph of a man in uniform and need to know what the badges and insignia indicate. Various specialist groups exist that might be able to help with such queries – for example, the Great War Forum (https://www.greatwarforum.org/) for 1914-1918, or the Victorian Military Society (https://www.victorianmilitary.org/) for the nineteenth century.
Although museums will be able to assist in many cases, they do not hold service records of individuals. The UK Government website provides instructions on requesting records: https://www.gov.uk/get-copy-military-service-records (be aware, though, that many records relating to men who served in the First World War were destroyed by bombing during the Second). Where museums are best placed to help is to give added context to basic information – so, for example, if you know that Private John Smith, service number 4317694, served in the 1st Battalion of the Blankshire Regiment in 1941, the regimental museum ought be to be able to tell you whereabouts the battalion was stationed at that time, what they were doing, and whether the museum holds any photographs or other records that might shed more light on the nature of his service.
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