COMMONWEALTH WAR GRAVES COMMISSION

w www.cwgc.org

The CWGC has been a go-to destination for many years now, home to a vast free database of individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice, and is as useful for seasoned researchers as it is for those new to family history. Via www.cwgc.org/find/find-wardead you can search by a number of fields. If your relative has an unusual surname, that alone may be enough to track down an entry. Conversely, searching for ‘Smith’ leads to 20,982 records, which you can then narrow by conflict, parent country, force and so on. A better bet is to try to narrow the results before you search, but remember that some CWGC records don’t include first names – so try with initials first. The website can also be very useful for confirming an ancestor’s service number.