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Saturday 21 April 2012

Soldiers Wills Crimean War - WWI and WW2 found. Replacement of the National Archives DocumentsOnline service at the end of April 2012.

Soldiers Wills Crimean War - WWI and WW2 found.

There is news, via the Federation of Family History Societies (FFHS), of the discovery of some 300,000 Soldiers Wills in boxes which have never been entered in the Calendars. It is expected that they will become available online by the end of the year. They cover the period of 1858 (Crimean War) through to 2nd WW, they include WWI wills. They appear to be the wills of non commissioned officers.

The information was given at the Probate Stake Holders Meeting held in London on 17th April 2012. Lady Teviot was the FFHS representative at the meeting.

Replacement of The National Archives DocumentsOnline service at the end of April 2012.   

The new catalogue is called Discovery and it will allow users to search the collection and download any available digitised documents all in one place.

The Catalogue will be completely replaced by the end of June 2012. The Discovery catalogue will offer additional features to the current DocumentsOnline Catalogue, including displaying search results in order of relevance, filtering of search results by subject, date range and collection, and enabling users to tag records with keywords to expand on catalogue descriptions.

More details can be found at New National Archives Catalogue

3 comments:

  1. These set of records will be of interest to anyone with a connection to the Royal Artillery.

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  2. Yes, they will be an important source for anyone with family/ancestors connected to the British army from the 1850's and as you say the Royal Atillery.

    It makes you wonder what other records are 'lost' in various archives if some 300,000 records can be overlooked.

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  3. thats very interesting as we have searched for records of my 2xgreat grandfather as he served in teh crimean but so far have not foound anything to link with him. Maybe one of those wills will be his

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