NEW on Documents Online

[Christine in Herts]

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Selected First World War and Army of Occupation War Diaries
Ministry of National Service poster (Cat ref: NATS 1/109)

The National Archives has been digitising selected War Diaries from the First World War. These files are some of our most frequently ordered original documents.

The diaries (held in the seriesLink to glossary - opens in a new window WO 95) are for British and colonial units serving in theatres of operations between 1914 and 1922.

They contain daily reports on operations, intelligence summaries and other pertinent material.

Many maps and plans were included in the original diaries and particularly confidential material was removed before the files were made available. This accounts for the absence of some appendices referred to on the covers of many diaries.

For more on these diaries please see the free research guide, British Army War Diaries: First World War, 1914-1918.

You can now search by both keyword and date of diary

Looks promising!

Christine

PS - the general search link, including Docs Online, is Search | Results

[Merry Monty Montgomery]

Nudge!!

[Christine in Herts]

Perhaps one more nudge? - just in case there are any folks left who missed both the fact itself and this alert for it.

Christine

[KiteRunner]

I'm sure they made the war diaries available online some time ago, didn't they? Is the change the addition of keyword to the search, or have they added some diaries that weren't in there before? I did have a play with it when they first made them available, but I think I came to the conclusion that it would work out very expensive to trawl through a few to see if my relly was mentioned in them or not.

[Christine in Herts]

They weren't in the main DocsOnline search-list before.

How much easier they are to search, and whether/not there are any more, I'm not sure.

Christine

[annswabey]

Yes, they've been on there for quite some time although I think they may still be adding to them.

[Christine in Herts]

I know they were listed on the site - but they weren't in the Advanced Search list - which is where I get a lot of my info from about additions to the list.

I guess the News is that you can search for them on Key Words - but I'm not sure , offhand, what the Key words would be. I think there's a bit more info below my orginal quoted stuff.

Christine

[Christine in Herts]

Just had another look...

You can now search by both keyword and date of diary:

* To look for a specific battalion or brigade, put your search terms into the keyword field in double quotation marks, for example, "12 Battalion Tank Corps" or "1 Tank Brigade Signal Company"
* You can use the keyword search for Theatre of Combat, for example "France, Belgium and Germany" (please note that this can produce thousands of results but only first 1000 documents will be displayed)
* You can also search a particular date as a Keyword. In this instance, as an example, you would use the format "1 April 1919".
* To search by date of diary use the Date Range field and type the date in the format day/month/year (for example 01/12/1917) or just the year 1917

[annswabey]

That site isn't very clear at all, is it?! Searches for the diaries don't work too well either!

[Christine in Herts]

On the other hand, you do get some gems - for only £3.50. It would cost me four times that just to travel in and out on the train from the edge of London.

Not such good value if you really want lots of stuff - but it does help you find out what's available. Sometimes there's enough info in the index if all you want is dates - assuming that the info was correct when originally supplied!

Christine