Friday 13 June 2014

Red Cross First World War POW cards to go online August

Peter Calver's latest Lost Cousins newsletter at www.lostcousins.com/newsletters/jun14news.htm carries news that the index cards currently being digitised by the International Prisoners-of-War Agency, set up by the Red Cross, will be available online in August of this year.

The agency's website notes that some 500,000 pages of lists and six million index cards index cards for both military POWs and civilian internees will be included. Looking forward to seeing if they might have anything on my civilian great uncle John Paton, who was interned at Ruhleben in Germany from 1916-1918.

The agency has not been accepting research requests for some time (five years) because of this project, so this should hopefully help when it makes an appearance.

The full story is available at http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/article/other/archives-first-world-war-2011-07-27.htm

UPDATE 13 SEP - above link now broken, but see http://grandeguerre.icrc.org/ for the database.

(With thanks to Peter)

Chris

Now available for UK research is the new second edition of the best selling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians, whilst my new book British and Irish Newspapers is also now out. And FindmyPast - please reinstate the original Scottish census citations on your new site.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for this update Chris, certainly looking forward to seeing if my great grandfather features; he was the first person to die at Ruhleben.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Clicking on the link results in a " page not found" 404 Error!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think they may have amended it to http://grandeguerre.icrc.org/ - will change in the post, thanks for highlighting

    Good luck Ruth! Let me know if you find anything :)

    ReplyDelete