World War One affected every level of society. Our case study shows the wide variety of records that reveal what happened to one renowned casualty
Wartime
Wartime
Many of us have ancestors who fought and died for king and country in World War One and would like to know more of their story. There are a number of useful resources that can be easily searched online to help you discover more about them.
Family historians can learn more about their ancestors who fought, and also those who may have perished, from a range of military records that includes war memorials, rolls of honour, medals, casualty lists and newspapers and magazines – all of these are available online at www.TheGenealogist.co.uk; you can also find pictures of the places ancestors may have known using the Image Archive.
For even the most casually observant person, there are many war memorials to be seen throughout Britain in memory of those who fell in the Great War. In towns, cities, villages, institutions and places of work, various plaques, statues and other edifices still exist to this day in commemoration of those who were killed. TheGenealogist has a growing number of War Memorial lists and books of Rolls of Honour, all of which can be easily searched to find our forebears.
Every level of society, even right up to the head of the British Government of the time, was touched by the conflict, with loved ones being wounded or killed.
At the beginning of World War One, the Prime Minister was the Liberal MP for East Fife, Herbert Henry Asquith; like many others in the country, he was to lose a son in the fighting that followed.
On 15 September 1916, Raymond Asquith, who was in civilian life a Barrister-at-Law who had studied at Oxford University and the PM’s eldest son, was killed of wounds received at the Battle of the Somme. At this point he was a Second Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. Raymond can be found on several war memorials connected with his prewar life and so we can easily find him in several data sets at TheGenealogist using its Master Search. See the examples on the next page for how easy these are to find.
In the print edition
Read more about WW1 records in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available online at discoveryourancestors.co.uk
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