Looking for your family’s military service history: a research guide

RESEARCHING the military service of your relatives can be much more complicated than simply plugging names into Google.

The Australian War Memorial website is a good place to start looking for information, but

In 2014 we’ve become very used to typing our search terms into Google and off we go, but researching the military service of your relatives can be much more complicated than that.

Many of the collections in our national and state institutions are only just now being digitised and made available publicly online.

With service records, diaries, letters, photographs, mentions in history books and so many other types of information waiting to be discovered, there are a raft of institutions worth investigating, some of them further down the technology track than others.

It’s a good idea to start at the National Archives of Australia, which holds the records about service in the Australian defence forces since Federation in 1901.

This fact sheet “Tracing ancestors in the National Archives” is very useful.

The Australian War Memorial has a fantastic set of fact sheets and research guides with tips and links for people looking for information.

Start with this Fact Sheet “Beginning your family history research”, which also contains links to the Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages in each state and territory.

You can visit the Commonwealth War Graves Commission here.

The Mitchell Library in NSW has, with support from News Corp Australia, almost finished digitising its collection of WWI diaries, which were purchased from soldiers all over Australia and New Zealand in the wake of the war.

Go here to see if you recognise any names.

Here is the Library’s research guide on its WWI collection.

The State Library of Victoria has this research guide called “Researching Australians in WWI”.

The State Library of South Australia has this guide to delving into its collection of mostly South Australian military material.

The State Library of Tasmania has this section dealing with its military history collection, including a link to Tasmania war records.

Members of the State Library of Queensland can search its “First World War — Personal Experiences” Collection here.

You can search the State Library of Western Australia’s moving “In memoriam” collection of WWI photographs here.