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.

Using regimental numbers in photographic research

I picked this photo up last week. The reverse shows it to have been taken by Henry Bown, "photographic artist" who had studios at 43 New Kent Road, south east London, 298 Clapham Road, south west London, and 31 & 33 Jamaica Road, south east London. At the top of the photo is some script which reads. "Nov 30 13. Len 16 yrs".

The photo clearly shows a boy bandsman wearing the collar badges of the Middlesex Regiment and so I thought I'd try and find out who Len was.

A boy could join the army from the age of 14 and so if Len was 16 years old in 1913 he could have joined from 1910 or 1911. Looking at my regimental numbers database, that would suggest that his number must have been within the approximate range L/13300 to L/14700. Assuming that Len went on to serve in the First World War I ran a search on the National Archives' medal index card database where "Leonard" was the first name, "Middlesex" was the regiment. I then ran different number search options to narrow the number range. This National Archives' search screen is far more efficient, and far quicker than the search screens on both Ancestry and Findmypast and what's more you can type in the search criteria in a single field, in any order and throw in wildcards to assist the search.

Running this search on L/13* and L/14* (and with searches for 13* and 14* as well, just to pick up examples where the L/ prefix had not been recorded) gave me a short-list of a dozen or so candidates and leads me to believe that Len is potentially L/13649 Leonard Alexander Watts from Poplar who attested for 12 years on the 6th July 1911 aged 14 years and 6 days. His parents were William and Ellen Watts and he had two older brothers and three younger brothers. It could be one of the older brothers who is in the photo with him.

I should stress that the photo could show the Watts family, but by the same token, there are still other candidates who need to be more fully investigated. Nevertheless, understanding how the regimental numbers were issued has, once again, narrowed the field considerably.

I research soldiers! 

Contact me if you need help with your military ancestor.