More than 6 million WW1 pension records that were saved from destruction by The Western Front Association are being scanned by genealogy subscription site Ancestry, ready to be made available online.
The records include details of surviving soldiers’ (along with some Royal Navy sailors’ and early RFC/RAF airmen’s) postwar pension claims and include valuable genealogical details. Family historian and military researcher Graham Caldwell told Family Tree that Ancestry and Findmypast’s existing British Army WW1 pension record collections (known as the burnt records – see the record extract from Ancestry, pictured here) are made up of only 750,000 surviving records, ‘including duplicates found at the Ministry of Pensions’, but he added: ‘The WFA saved more than 6 million WW1 pension cards from destruction two years ago, which vastly help replace the 4 million WW1 soldiers’ service records lost in WW2’.