Record Masterclass
If a relation fought in the Royal Artillery, there’s now an easy way to find out about their experiences during the Second World War, says Phil Tomaselli
Follow a relation’s service via Royal Artillery tracer cards
The release of the first batches of Second World War Royal Artillery tracer cards on ancestry.co.uk (rather than Ancestry’s military records website fold3.com) at bit.ly/ anc-tracer provides a possible means of tracing an artillery soldier’s wartime career if you’ve no access to his service record.
From the 1870s the War Office began centralising regimental records in regional record offices for infantry regiments and in central offices for corps like the Cavalry, Royal Engineers and the Royal Artillery. Service records were held at these record offices and updated by a host of Army clerks who had to do everything by hand, copying and filing information as it arrived from units at home and abroad. Card indexes were created so that clerks could check basic information on individuals without having to consult the main records. These include the tracer cards, which allowed them to find the location of an individual soldier through their unit at a glance.
The records in the collection are searchable by name. However, a quick look at the Royal Artillery attestations on findmypast. co.uk at bit.ly/fmp-artilleryattest suggests that a tranche of cards containing names of men beginning with ‘Aa…’ to ‘Ac…’ are missing, some soldiers whose service records I possess aren’t present and other gaps suggest that possibly half of all of the original cards may be missing, probably because they were destroyed if a man was commissioned, killed or discharged through injury during the war. We are assured that these are all of the tracer cards that survive.
However, note that these records are for rank and file only, so you won’t be able to use them to get information about officers’ movements.
of ‘The cards provide a means tracing a soldier’s wartime career’
Number, Not Name
The cards are arranged alphabetically and few, if any, have a date of birth. However, they do have each soldier’s unique Army number, so if you know it you can be certain that you’ve found your relation. The early cards were clearly simply that: blank cards on which the name, number, date of enlistment and first unit were handwritten at the top. The clerks wrote changes beneath the unit details on the right-hand side of the card, and sometimes crossed out previous ones as they did so. As more information came in they moved to using
the left-hand side of the card. The backs of the cards don’t seem to have been used. Later cards are clearly pre-printed, and may contain details into the early 1950s.
The units to which each soldier is posted generally have a number and an abbreviated title. You can use this information to search for their War Diaries at The National Archives at Kew, using TNA’s online catalogue Discovery: discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk. These will tell you where they were and what they were doing on a daily basis, although ordinary soldiers are rarely mentioned by name. Note that you’ll have to visit Kew in person to see them, since they’ve not been digitised.
On many cards you’ll find the soldier being referred to as being on an “X List”, with a bracketed number after it. These record periods when the soldier is absent from his unit. It is generally agreed (although any former