Your Projects
Rosemary Collins hears how volunteers have made tracing wartime ancestors in Rotherham a whole lot easier…
How volunteers built an index of Rotherham’s soldiers
Anyone who’s tried to find the records of an ancestor who fought in the First or Second World Wars will know that they are often frustratingly hard to track down. Documents are scattered around different archives, missing or access to them is limited. If your military forebear lived in Rotherham, however, you’re in luck. A couple of volunteers from the town have put tremendous effort into creating searchable indexes of Rotherham’s soldiers from 1899 to 1953, drawing on local newspapers held at Rotherham Archives and Local Studies Service.
Andy Featherstone has been indexing Rotherham’s military records for almost 20 years and has co-written a book on the town’s war memorial records. He’s been working with Jayne Daley since 2011.
In July, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, Andy and Jayne completed one of their biggest projects yet: an index of almost 8,000 Rotherham citizens who served in the conflict. They went through back issues of the Rotherham Advertiser and indexed all the photos of Army, Navy, RAF, Home Guard and women’s services personnel published between 1939 and 1947.
Taking Research Up A Gear
“If you’re looking for someone and there isn’t an index, it takes a lot of time to go through all the newspapers on film to try and find something,” Jayne explains. “But if it’s indexed, you know there’s a photo there, so you can cut down your research.”
Andy and Jayne have spent five to six hours a week on the project and have created 22 indexes, primarily drawing on articles and photographs in the Rotherham Advertiser and the South Yorkshire Times, covering the Boer War, First and Second World Wars and Korean War.
Indexes from the First World War include Rotherham men who served in the Coldstream Guards, at the Gallipoli campaign and at the Battle of Jutland. Andy and Jayne have compiled lists of military honours awarded in both wars too. Through their research, they have also discovered that they’re cousins by marriage.
One of the most unique collections they’ve indexed is a set of letters in Rotherham archives about the building of the town’s war memorial. “When the memorial committee was set up in about 1921 they asked for suggestions of names to go on the memorial and we’ve indexed those,” Andy said. “These letters contain stories, things you don’t know about. You’re not going to get any more personal than that.” Now they’ve completed the Second World War project, the pair are currently working on newspaper articles from the interwar period. These include interviews with Rotherham’s last Crimean War veteran. He claims to have met Florence Nightingale: “I think they all say that!” jokes Jayne.
Despite the hard work involved, the pair agree that the project has meant a lot to them. “Some men, they’ve probably not got family around, they can’t speak for themselves, so you feel lucky to honour them,” Jayne says. Andy adds: “You kind of get to know them. They shouldn’t be forgotten.”
things ‘These letters contain stories, you don’t know about. You can’t that’ get any more personal than