Military Hospitals Admission and Discharge Register: Forces War Record

[Hedley Malloch]

I have received a notification from Forces War Records that they have found information concerning a soldier of interest is in their Military Hospitals Admission and Discharge Register WW1 collection. After pressing the button for further details I was invited to pay £55.

I am already subscribed to Ancestry and FMP and am not inclined to pay any more money.

Does anyone know where the 'hard' copy of this Register is kept? TNA? NAM?

Many thanks for all information received.

[Simon_Fielding]

Who's the man you're interested in Hedley?

[spof]

Hedley

They are held at TNA in MH 106

Glen

[Hedley Malloch]

Sear Simon and Glen,

Thank you for the information and offer. The man is William Murphy. He was in variously 3 Connaught Rangers (S/3699) and the Labour Corps (391205). He could have been registered in the hospital under both accounts.

Many thanks

Hedley

[Ron Clifton]

Hedley

Just a quick comment: unless you know which hospital he was in, trawling through MH106 may be a very long job. I don't know whether the registers are indexed but I suspect not.

Ron

[sotonmate]

Hedley

I have just searched on name and service number on the website of FWR, you can do this without charge and up comes a list of soldiers with that name who have appeared in the MH 106 registers. I don't see a Connaught with S/3699 or a LC with 391205.

I have in the past sought info on a QRWS soldier and have had several "advices" from FWR that an entry could be of use to me, but none of them have been QRWS, and I do know the unit history of my man.

Edit: agree with Ron, a big job. The Registers have no Index.

[Simon_Fielding]

Sadly I can't see any trace of him either....

[TEW]

There is a 4452 Sgt. W Murphy of the Connaught Rangers and a 5117 W Murphy Connaught Rangers.

Perhaps these are the men the search software thinks could be a soldier of interest to you. (And ignoring your actual search).

I think (and stand to be corrected) that FWR have transcibed MH106 only for the FA of the 41st and 5th Divs.

This should mean that if they have your man he would be in those divisions??

TEW

[JulianB]

After the war the WO destroyed a vast amount of such records and I believe that the "sample" kept is only about 2%. That said, the NA records some 3k records within MH106, they are listed per hospital / CCS etc. Helpfully, they list which hospital etc was used by which Division. I am very lucky that the men I was after were in 41st Div. I visited Kew over a few years going through the MH106 data and picked up quite a number of men for the unit I am interested in.

[Hedley Malloch]

Thank you all for your help. I'll browse MH 106 the next time I am at TNA.

[Kath]

I found a PPCLI man, but have a lot of info. already which cost nothing.

It would be worth makiing a list & having a month's sub.

Kath.

[hazelclark]

Thanks for the link.

[timbo58]

Just an update.

It isn't £55 for a look at the MH106 records (£55 is a year discounted sub for all records on the site -there are far cheaper options too of course) and as sotonmate correctly says a free search will quickly tell you whether it's a record we've done thus far (around 6 months to go).

JulianB is spot on too -the collection was , as I understand it, kept originally at Battersea power station then when the station was recommissioned in 1920(?) the records could not be stored elsewhere so the MH decided to keep a representative sample of between 2 and 3% of all records to analyse for statistical purposes and the rest was destroyed.

If you want to search the collection only go to the FWR site, click on 'collections list' (LHS bar) and select the name.

The results will be in 2 sections -the upper one will be only from the MH106 collection and the lower one of similar names from the MH106 collection.

I did list on another thread the FA/CCS's that should be in MH106 and we are transcribing all of the surviving admission/discharge registers so I don't think these are restricted to just the 2 divisions mentioned earlier overall anyway.

We recognise the index that we would have completed by the end of this project would be invaluable to finding the original record (from the 1278 folders possible at Kew) and we may be able to put the index itself up for free somewhere on the site to allow anyone to at least know where the original folder is within MH106 for each soldier listed.

[sotonmate]

timbo

Thanks for the update. "Your" digitised records are becoming more and more useful !!