Are you stuck? Do you need more help?
Helpful communities
There are some excellent internet discussion forums and websites where your questions might have already been answered, and you'll find people willing to help.
The Great War Forum
The British Medals Forum
The Western Front Association
Interactive help on this site
The "Ask Away" forum on this site is temporarily disabled for some technical development work. My apologies. I will try to replace it asap.
Using professional help
There are two primary reasons why you might need to engage professional help in researching your soldier.
- Despite rapid digitisation and access through the internet, many of the important documents are held in archives that you may not find easy or economic to visit.
- Military documents can be very difficult to understand. They are full of codes, abbreviations, acronyms, numbers, squiggles and everything designed to stop you understanding them!
Engaging professional help can be a very cost-effective way of searching the archives. There are a number of competent researchers who will look things up for you. They vary in their fees and approach. As with any purchase, be sure to check who you are dealing with, be sure what you are buying, be sure what you will receive, be sure what it will cost. You can find a list at the National Archives website.
There are not many researchers who will also help you understand what you or they have found.
Chris Baker, author of the Long, Long Trail, established a research business some years ago to do exactly that. fourteeneighteen|research has now studied almost 4000 soldiers of the British Army of the Great War for more than 3000 private clients. If you're stuck or need more help, this is the place to go.
fourteeneighteen|research