Finding Elsie's boy

It's always nice to hear a success story, better still to be instrumental in that success.

Earlier this week I had an email from the Royal Cornwall Museum who are putting together an exhibition based on a series of diaries written by a local Cornishwoman. Elsie, the woman in question refers to 'Charlie' going off to fight in the First World War, and the museum wanted to know if I could help identify Charlie. They knew his name and the fact that he enlisted in March 1915 and that later in the war he was wounded whilst serving with the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. Later, by now with the 1st Battalion, he was wounded again. Could I help identify Charlie?

The key to getting close to this was identifying his regimental number. Knowing he enlisted in March 1915 with a service battalion enabled me to advise the museum that his regimental number must have been between - approximately - 18600 and 19300.  The next step was to run some searches on my British Army Ancestors website which has 11.6m records and includes records in WO 372 (medal index cards) and WO 363 and WO 364 (service and pension records). The search is flexible and I advised the museum to run searches on his forename, regiment and number, using the wildcard * to obtain maximum results. The search looks like this on the site:

Here, typing Char* would identify men called Charles or Charlie (or Charlemagne) and 186* would identify all numbers beginning with 186. Cornwall* saves typing out "Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry" and would also catch mis-spellings like Duke of Cornwalls Light Infantry and other combinations. 

I advised the museum to run the same search for 187*, 188* 189* etc and to makes note of all the results. Three hours later I got a message back to say that they'd discovered who Charlie was. Actually, the exact words were, "Your site is incredible, and the information you provided has led me to my Charlie after weeks of searching for him! Thank you – the rather irksome mystery is no more!"

The Charlie concerned is this man, Charles William Haslam, who served with the 1st, 7th and 2nd Battalions of the DCLI.

I'm thrilled that a combination of my regimental numbers' knowledge, and my decision to invest in a website which provides a simple search across millions of British Army records has yielded such a fast and positive result. Now to find a photo of Charlie.

I research soldiers! 

Contact me if you need help.