Army Service Numbers 1881-1918: a 2020 retrospective

 

As 2020 draws to a close, here are some of my highlights of the year.

• Including this post, a late flurry in December has seen me publish 41 Army Service Numbers blog posts
• I wrote 1 Army Ancestry Research  blog post and have effectively abandoned this blog
• I responded to over 600 British Army research enquiries through my blogs, via Facebook and via email. In the last 365 days I have written hundreds of thousands of words about the British Army.
• I published 16 blog posts on my British Army Ancestors website and added tens of thousands of photos. The site now has over 100,000 photos and 12m searchable records
• I continue to post daily on the British Army Ancestors Facebook page and commemorate those who gave so much. The photo on this post was published on the Facebook page on Christmas Day this year.

In addition to social media - restricted to Facebook these days - I delivered a number of online military presentations and published articles. As time allowed, I also continued with my own research projects and have been looking at prisoner of war casualties and the British Army of 1911 for the most part. Lack of funding has prevented me from doing as much as I would have liked to do in these areas.

I managed to buy the missing 1915 and 1919 KRRC Chronicles and was also fortunate to buy a complete run of Oxfordshire Light Infantry chronicles - and successor regimental titles - from 1892 until the 2000s. I continue to be tempted by books, photos and medals and have bought and sold all in small quantities

So what else is in store for 2021?

I will continue with the daily posting on the British Army Ancestors Facebook page and having added enhancements to the main site, will continue to improve the functionality. I will continue posting on this blog with a target post count of 40. 

I will continue delivering online webinars and have been invited to host a two-day British Military history seminar in November and am very much looking forward to this.

Covid-19, wokeism, assaults on freedom of speech, revisionist history and the destruction of national monuments have combined to make 2020 a dreadful year. I can only hope that 2021 will be better.  

I research soldiers! 

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