To find out as much as we can about an ancestor drives most family historians to keep researching. We often find ourselves compelled to look further into the person’s life and it may have begun when we came across them in a record. Another trigger point for many of us is a physical family heirloom such as a medal, a certificate or an old photograph. Some of us may be collectors and have acquired an interesting medal or set of medals and are fired up to discover more about the individual who had earned the award or awards.

For the family historian, medals are a material link with your family member. You can hold in your hand something they held and that they once wore. They are also a great way into researching records featuring your ancestor.

Personnel who had served in the armed forces will invariably feature in the military records collections, but don’t forget that other services such as the merchant navy, police, fire, ambulance and nursing organisations were the recipients of awards as well. If, however, your forebear’s medal is from the army, navy or air force then this is a great aspect to explore as the military had a tendency to create a number of records and many of these are available online, enabling us to easily use them to build our family story.

If you have inherited a set of medals then it is worth examining them for details that may be engraved or impressed upon them. Many of the medals issued to British service members include markings that detail who the recipient was. The medals may be engraved or may have had the words and numbers impressed into them with pressure applied to the metal to stamp the inscription. This wording can include the name, service number, rank and unit, all of which details are great news for the historian as they can be useful to have when following up the person in the records. There are, however, exceptions to the inclusion of text about the recipient on the medal, with the Second World War campaign medals being a prime example where it was omitted. They, along with early to mid Victorian-era campaigns such as the Crimea, do not have details engraved or impressed on them.

A tangible piece of the past
With medals kept in a safe place, the family of a WW1 soldier has a tangible link to their past family member. These medals may still have their original posting box and have been passed down the family in that box. It is important, in that case, to keep it together with the medal as the box will have some details of the recipient typed on its outside. From this we will see the soldier’s name and rank and the regiment or unit in which he served, plus we get his service number. Often with the medals there will be the ribbon and perhaps the ribbon bar for wearing when full medals were not required.

The award of the medals will have created a record and so we can turn to those in order to find out more to help us trace the soldier further. The medals themselves can be a very good starting point. Medals were awarded to our forebears for a number of reasons, they could be for campaign service, long service, loyalty, accomplishment, acts of bravery and heroism.

A good example from the First World War are the medals and their records created for the WW1 campaign medals. Consisting of the 1914 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, they were often affectionately known as Pip, Squeak and Wilfred; these are most likely to have been passed down as a family heirloom. When they were originally issued in the 1920s it coincided with a popular comic strip published by the Daily Mirror newspaper and written by Bertram J. Lamb (‘Uncle Dick’) with illustrations drawn by the cartoonist Austin Bowen Payne (A.B. Payne). The characters were Pip the dog, Squeak the penguin and Wilfred the young rabbit. For some reason the three names of the cartoon characters, and the three campaign medals being issued at that time to the thousands of returning servicemen, became associated and so even today they are known by these nicknames.

Mostly awarded to men of the British Expeditionary Force (often called the Old Contemptibles) their official medal cards recorded which medal a service person was entitled to. To search for medal cards can be easily accomplished by looking in TheGenealogist’s Military record collection where they have digitised the cards. If a soldier fought in a theatre of war overseas, they would be entitled to up to three campaign medals, depending on the period in which they fought.

In the picture we can see a set of medals from this conflict. Impressed on the back of the 1914-15 Star is the soldier’s service number, rank and regiment, while these details are on the rim of the Victory and British War Medals. From this he is identified as being Gunner T. BERRY. R.F.A. having served in the Royal Field Artillery with service number 9827. By entering these details into the search on TheGenealogist we are able to find his medal card. This reveals that he also served in the Royal Garrison Artillery under the service number 220689, but had first served in France in 1915 and so this explains why he was entitled to the 1915 Star.

With Gunner Berry’s service number we are then able to search the rest of the military records available on TheGenealogist and discover him listed in the Casualty Lists. This tells us that he was wounded and it gives us the name of his home town, Swinton.

We have been able to find Gunner Berry in the Medal Roll cards because he served in the British Army. As the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force did not produce Medal Index Cards like the British Army did members of these branches would have their entitlements listed on their original Service Records. A problem for researchers is that many of these records were destroyed during the Second World War.

WW2 RAF reports reveal actual medal presentations
Turning to that next conflict, there are no easily accessible medal cards for the Army, Navy or RAF that the researcher can use. Instead service records will have been stamped if the serviceman has claimed their medals, something not all may have done. Unlike earlier medals, those issued in WW2 do not have the name or details stamped or engraved upon them. Merchant navy campaign medal records 1939-1945, however, are available from The National Archives (TNA) and can be downloaded from the TNA website. This collection of records, BT 395, lists the medals awarded to merchant seamen for their service in the Second World War (1939-1945), with the exception of the Arctic Star, and was a resource that I was able to use to find my own father’s medal awards for his time at sea during the war on QSMV Dominion Monarch, an armed merchant troop carrier.

To find other evidence of when a medal was issued may require a little lateral thinking. For example, I was aware that my great-uncle served as an engineer in the RAF from before 1938 until well after WW2. Using the operations record books (ORBs) I was able to find a date when he was awarded a medal by a visiting dignitary to his station. You can also find mentions of famous pilots being awarded decorations, such as Wing Commander Guy Gibson and his Dambuster pilots when the king approved their Victoria Crosses just after their mission on the German dams.

A medal bar or medal clasp is a thin metal bar which is attached to the ribbon of a medal. In many cases it indicates the campaign or operation in which the recipient received the award and multiple bars on the same medal ribbon will indicate that the recipient had met the standard required for receiving that medal in multiple theatres of war. When a recipient is awarded a decoration for exceptional service, such as gallantry medals, on more than one occasion then they will receive a bar to wear on the ribbon and not the same medal again. Wing Commander Gibson, for example, not only had the Victoria Cross but was also awarded a DSO & Bar as well as a DFC & Bar.

Another source to bear in mind for a researcher looking into the medals of an officer is the official journal of record for the British government, the London Gazette. This published commissions in the armed forces and the subsequent promotion of officers as well as the granting of any awards of honours and military medals.

Priceless or sentimental value
Looking after your medal collection is vital whether they are a valuable set with an interesting provenance or just because they are a link to your family member. If the value of a medal is important to you as a collector then it should be recognised that a complete group of medals awarded to a particular person is more valuable than the same number of individual medals. The value will be more if the recipient was well known or if any of the medals were awarded for valour. Research notes as well as any additional personal items of the holder will also add to the value of the medal group.

Storing your medals should be a high priority for the collector and luckily there are various safe ways to do this. It is important not to use any storage that may damage the medal by emitting acidic vapours. It is best to use inert plastic containers such as polyethylene or polystyrene or to keep your medals in metal storage cabinets. Another option if you have large quantities of medals or badges is to store and display them inside a binder album using specialist acid-free refill pages. There are various useful products to store, protect or display your precious medals available to purchase from the collectible storage specialists ArrowFile .

Medals, whether they are a precious link to our forefathers or an interesting collector’s item, are a tangible connection to a person who will undoubtedly have been recorded by the service to which they had belonged. The medal is always made more valuable when the story of the recipient can be told and so researching in the records for mentions of them and what they did is worthwhile. Safely storing the medals in inert specialist storage will look after them for the generations to come as well as to keep their value. As we remember the fallen this remembrance day, as well as those who served in any capacity and received an honour, it is important to look after any medals in our possession as tangible links to our recent ancestors. {