Completion of Burnt Records filming

[christine liava'a]

" Family History

Completion of the WO 363 First World War 'Burnt Documents' Project

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The last remaining reels of microfilm of soldiers and non-commissioned officers service records, 1914 -1920, in WO 363, have now been made available to the public.

The release of the mis-sorted material marks the end of a microfilming project which began in 1995 and has resulted in the release of some two million service records.

Project Background

In September 1940, a fire caused by an incendiary bomb at the War Office Record Store in Arnside Street, London destroyed about two thirds of 6.5 million soldiers' documents for the First World War. The records that survived were mostly charred or water damaged and unfit for consultation and became known as the 'burnt documents'.

With the aid of the Heritage Lottery Funding (HLF) and the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU), the Public Record Office (PRO) has recently completed a major project to microfilm this series, consisting of over 33,000 boxes of service records of some 2 million soldiers.

The records vary in size from a single sheet to dozens of pages of documents. The most common items to be found in them include attestation papers (giving basic information about name, address, date of birth and next of kin), medical records, discharge papers and Army Form B 103: Casualty Form-Active Service, which provides information about an individual's military career.

Because many individual pages are fire and/or water damaged, the originals are too fragile to be made available to researchers in their original condition.

Research had indicated that filming of these documents would allow family historians, military historians and descendants of the soldiers access to information on at least 2 million individuals. The information in these records is of wide value to the academic community and, as expected, the microfilms have proved popular..

The GSU completed its filming of 11,000 boxes of records in 1995 but did not have the resources to film the remaining 22,000 boxes. In 1995 the PRO received HLF funding for a pilot project to microfilm approximately 10 per cent. Based on the success of this pilot the PRO applied, successfully, for further HLF funding from July 1998 to microfilm the remainder of the collection. In its funding application the PRO stressed that filming these documents and making the microfilms available would meet the HLF's criteria of 'importance of the project to the heritage' and 'benefits to the public' . It would provide an important adjunct to existing material on a major event in the nation's history and a unique and vivid insight into the lives of those who lived through it.

Towards the end of 2000 the popularity of the films of these records led the PRO to investigate the possibility of accelerating the microfilming programme. After negotiations with the microfilming contractor, Microformat, an acceleration programme was agreed with the HLF in February 2001 and filming was completed in August 2002.

Making the records available to users

It is estimated that only one third of all service records survive in WO 363, the vast majority having been destroyed in 1940. WO 363 contains service records for soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were discharged between 1914 and 1920, including regular soldiers who may have enlisted as early as 1892 for 22 years' service. The series does not include the discharge papers of soldiers who continued in the army after 1920 or soldiers who transferred to another service, taking their service record with them. Records of the Household Cavalry or Guards regiments are held elsewhere (see below, Other Related Sources).

The records were stored and filmed in alphabetical order of a soldier's surname but when seeking information about a particular individual you should bear in mind that their surname may have been misspelt or they may have used a false name when they enlisted.

All of WO 363 is available on microfilm in the PRO at Kew. Copies are also available via the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Family History Centres http://www.familysearch.org. The records are arranged alphabetically by surname of soldier. Microfilms have been released to the public in the PRO's Microfilm Reading Room at Kew throughout the filming programme as filming of individual surname letters has been completed. There are more than 29,000 reels of microfilm, each containing up to 60 records. S is the most popular letter with some 3,349 reels containing - among others - the records of 1,500 John Smiths. H, M and W are also popular letters with 2916, 2,478 and 2,451 reels respectively. Some letters fare less well - A with 738 reels and N with only 398 reels. During the course of the project 5,000 service records were discovered out of alphabetical sequence (after their correct place had been filmed). These have been all been filmed and placed at the end of the series in a collection of mis-sorts.

Our usage surveys have showed that WO 363 is by far the heaviest used series of records on microfilm. The most recent survey, carried out between 16 and 22 February 2002, showed that of a total of 2,556 microfilms consulted, 758 (equivalent to just under 30%) were productions of films of First World War soldiers' burnt documents. On the basis of these figures, an estimated 40,000 microfilms were being consulted annually - six months before the project was completed.

Other Related Sources

The First World War soldiers' and non-commissioned officers' records of the Household Cavalry and the Guards Regiments have all survived intact. They were not stored with the other regiments' records which sustained the bombing in 1940. The records of the Household Cavalry, including the Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards and Household Battallion, are currently unavailable and are being prepared for transfer into PRO series WO 400 in late 2002. In the meantime, microfilm copies of most are held at the Household Cavalry Museum, Combermere Barracks, Windsor, Berkshire SL4 3DN. Written enquiries are welcomed but if you want to see the records you should first contact the Museum for access conditions before making your visit. The Guards Regiments are places of deposit for their own records and you can access these by writing to the Regimental Headquarters, The Grenadier/Coldstream/Scots/Irish/Welsh Guards (delete as appropriate), Wellington Barracks, Birdcage walk, London SW1E 6HQ.

WO 364: War Office: Soldiers' Documents from Pension Claims, First World War, are sometimes referred to as the 'Unburnt Documents'. They have been microfilmed by volunteers of the Genealogical Society of Utah under an agreement with the Ministry of Defence. The WO 364 series consists of microfilm copies of service records of non-commissioned officers and other ranks who were discharged from the Army and claimed disability pensions for war service between 1914 and 1920 and did not re-enlist prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

The provenance of these records is important in understanding that they are unlikely to contain any papers for men who were either killed in action and had no dependants or who were discharged as part of the demobilisation at the end of the war and did not claim a pension. If seeking a particular record you should be aware of the substantial possibility that it does not survive in this series.

As with WO 363, some records had not been stored or filmed in the correct alphabetical order. Files discovered out of order after their letter series had been processed were filmed and placed at the end of the series. Alternatively, a file may have been out of order when filmed due to either a misspelling or misreading of a soldier's surname; for example, the record for a soldier of the first or second name Stanley may have been filed and subsequently filmed with soldiers of that surname, whilst a file with the surname Allan may been stored with the surname Allen, similarly if the surname was double barrelled and misread and so on.

Within WO 364 there are two main alphabetical collections of service records. WO 364/5000-5804 form a separate collection formerly known as the 'Third Collation' (the other two collations being in WO 363 and that material already in WO 364). The collection consists of records similar to those already in WO 364, namely material relating to soldiers who claimed a disability pension for First World War service."

PRO Research letter