Ancestry adds UK WW1 War Diaries

Two new valuable record collections have appeared on Ancestry sourced from WO 95/1096–3948 at TNA.

UK, WWI War Diaries (France, Belgium and Germany), 1914-1920 Military, 402,770 records

Includes diaries for operations in Russia and the armies of occupation in Germany following the Armistice.

The diaries contain daily reports on operations, intelligence summaries, and other pertinent material, and they can provide an on-the-spot description of what your ancestor experienced. The range of dates shown for individual items does not mean there is a document inside the file for each day between the two covering dates.

UK, WWI War Diaries (Gallipoli and Dardanelles), 1914-1916 Military, 33,350 records

Included are diaries for Australia and New Zealand units.

The diaries include information on a unit’s movements, where the unit was stationed on a given day, what activities troops were engaged in, and other information, such as embarkation, travel, or casualties. 

For both these you can either search by Regiment or Unit, Diary Entry Start Date and Location, or browse the original records. There is no name index.

I searched for the diary for the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) on 31 July 1917, the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. An exact search returned 12 entries with start dates from the 7th to the 31st of July. Included one for the 12th Battalion where my great uncle, a 2nd Lt was mentioned as having been wounded and died.

Ancestry have also updates the collections

UK, WWI Service Medal and Award Rolls, 1914-1920, 6,526,145 records
UK, Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914-1919,  703,810 records