Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Your WWI Ancestor


The Great War : a guide to the service records of all the world's fighting men and volunteers / Christina K. Schaefer. -- Baltimore, Md. : Genealogical Pub. Co., c1998.

929.3 SCH and R929.3 SCH GENEALOGY

The Glenview Public Library owns this helpful book, recommended for people trying to locate World War I records for their ancestors.. Here is a description from the Genealogical Publishing Company of its many useful features:

"Anyone on the trail of a World War I service record is more likely to be successful if she/he is equipped with a roadmap to the records of that tragic conflict. And roadmap, indeed, is exactly what genealogist Christina K. Schaefer has created in her magnificent guidebook, The Great War: A Guide to the Service Records of All the World's Fighting Men and Volunteers.

Organized by country, The Great War provides at-a-glance information on the existence of records and how they can be accessed. Each chapter begins with an outline history of a given country's involvement in the conflict as it impacts on the records. The author then lists all extant record groups for that nation's army and navy. So, for example, we are provided with a list of every German army regiment, followed by another list of the capital ships and U-boats that served the Kaiser. The lengthy U.S. chapter lists the national repositories and then record holdings state by state. Each chapter concludes with a breakdown of that nation's military archives and their holdings and a bibliography of suggested further reading.

For researchers who can profit from a brushing-up on their World War I history, Mrs. Schaefer begins the book with a detailed timeline of events from 1914 to 1918. The volume concludes with a number of very useful features: (1) records pertaining to the aftermath of the war (e.g. service records of the Red Cross); (2) a table of the political changes ushered in by the war; and (3) a list of World War I sources available on the Internet at the time of the book's original publication in 1998."

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