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papers. They allow us to follow up other leads on the lives of our
ancestors.
Genes Reunited
proved very valuable as a means of contacting families
of the soldier group I was researching, especially Fred Barley’s family in
New Zealand and the ancestors of Bill Gilchrist and Herbert Bradley who
still live locally. I thank them for their frank and informative contribution.
Ancestry.com
can also be used as a means of confirming details, but I
have avoided it due to its cost and my desire to provide a low cost means
of finding soldier ancestors.
Even a simple request to find AIF soldiers’ ancestors in the
Newcastle
Herald
also proved successful.
David Dial’s accounts in the same paper can be beneficial particularly if
you have dates for enlistments and deaths for a particular soldier.
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
While there are a variety of sources of information about our World War
1 soldiers, a Commonwealth organization and three Australian
government agencies hold some of the most consistent and reliable
information.
The bodies are:
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
(CWGC)
Australian War Memorial;
National Archives; and
National Library.
The
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
(CWGC)
was set
up after the war to identify the graves of the Commonwealth war dead. It
lists the details and place of burial of 1.7 million Commonwealth soldiers
who fought in two World Wars.
It even involved the digging up of graves in the attempt to identify bodies.
Those who couldn’t be identified or hadn’t been found are still
acknowledged by panels at cemetery sites like Menin Gate.
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