Search for your British military ancestor in the War Office Weekly Casualty List from the First World War. The lists contain the names of those who were reported as wounded, missing, taken prisoner of war, or killed in action. The list will provide the individual’s name, rank, regiment, and service number.
Search for your British military ancestor in the War Office Weekly Casualty List from the First World War. The lists contain the names of those who were reported as wounded, missing, taken prisoner of war, or killed in action. The list will provide the individual’s name, rank, regiment, and service number.
Each record will give you an image of the War Office Weekly Casualty List, a weekly publication of the names of those who were reported as missing, taken prisoner of war, wounded, or killed in action. With each name you may find a combination of the following:
Name
Rank – Assume the rank of private if not otherwise noted
Regiment
Service number
Location
The weekly lists were updated; therefore, if your ancestor was previously listed as missing, you may find your ancestor’s name a second time listed as wounded or killed in action.
There are gaps in the issues between 1 January 1918 and 23 April 1918. The record images have been put through a process of OCR (optical character recognition) which can lead to incorrect search results. Furthermore, some of the original documents have been damaged, which can also lead to incorrect search results. You can view more search tips below.
These records have been digitally scanned and converted to machine-encoded text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This process is not perfect and the machine may have misread characters, especially in personal names, which causes searches to fail.
All search results will bring you to the page on which your search word has been found and not to an individual transcript. You can then read through the page to find your result.
The search feature uses direct search. It will only search for the exact words you type in the search field. If you are unable to find your relative on your first search, you can try different name variations. A number of lists only use abbreviations for first names. For example, if your search is unsuccessful for William Smith, try W Smith.