WW1 War Diaries kept at various organizational levels are useful to paint the larger picture of a soldier's war. The UK diaries have been the subject of a TNA digitization project, funded from the surplus from commercial cooperative projects, not itself attractive enough to find a commercial partner. The diaries are not yet online.
Here's TNA's announcement:
For the past few months we have been digitising part of the WO 95 record series, which consists of unit war diaries from the First World War. The series is one of the most requested in our reading rooms in Kew, and digitising these diaries will enable us to publish them online, making them more accessible for the First World War centenary.
Digitisation has now been completed and all diaries from the WO 95 series are now back in circulation. The digitised diaries will be launched online as soon as it is feasible before the centenary period begins, but at present we are unable to provide specific details - please keep watching our website for updates.
This is one of the rare occasions where LAC has been ahead, almost a decade ahead, with the CEF diaries available at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/archivianet/02015_e.html
This Expeditionary Forces link to the old ArchivariaNet database doesn't work anymore.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of problems with LAC's website, from overall general policy to actual tracing old links, however, another ARCHIVED link to the diaries still works.
Go to and searches can still be performed and pages displayed.
Unfortunately, the old Exhibition pages have disappeared.
The link for the diaries search is:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/archivianet/020152_e.html