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In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War

The Centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has lead to an increased interest in the lives of soldiers and others in WWI. However, it can be difficult for novice researchers to find their way through military jargon and structures and to get a sense of what life in the Great War was like for a particular person at a particular time - where were they, and what did they experience? Sometimes rich personal accounts have survived, but in many cases, you only have a name, and perhaps a service number or regiment or battalion name.

This project aims provide context for an individual's experience of WWI by linking to narratives written by people in the same situation. At the end of this project, someone who wants to research a soldier in WWI but doesn't know a thing about how armies were structured should be able to find a personal account from someone who was in the same place at the same time that gives a sense of their lived experiences of WWI.

The challenge is to link these personal accounts by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit. To populate this dataset, personal accounts (diaries, letters, etc) need to be linked to specific soldiers, who can then be linked to specific units. Linking published accounts such as official unit histories to pages would also help. Once these personal accounts are linked to particular military units, they can be linked to higher units - from the battalion, ship or regiment to brigade, corps, etc - and to particular places, activities, events and campaigns.

In this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military unit in the British Army. Can you help?

Anyone can sign up to this wiki (but not you, spam bots!) to help out. Specifically, you can help populate or check the list of military units, or add to the list of personal and official diaries, letters, memoirs, etc.

Project task list

• Populate list of military units: Australian battalions in World War I, British divisions in World War I (better still, a list of British battalions in World War I), Canadian battalions in World War I, Indian battalions in World War I, Italian battalions in World War I, New Zealand battalions in World War I. A list of battalions is needed to form the basis for the collecting process. (I'm starting with a list of divisions because I can get it from Wikipedia, but I know this is problematic)
• Collate lists of personal diaries, letters, memoirs that can be linked to units through their authors
• Collate lists of official unit diaries and histories
• Collate resources on researching World War One records to help researchers know where to start
• Create a sample battalion page as a demonstrator to show how personal accounts can be linked

This project is part of a Transnational Research Fellowship with the CENDARI project at Trinity College Dublin's Long Room Hub. Further information is available on the 'about' page of this wiki.