Three types of Military books are useful to genealogists : Rolls of Honour, Army/Navy List and Regimental Histories.

Rolls of honour generally list those from a Region or a Regiment who have fallen in various Wars or Campaigns. They often provide details such as home address, parents, occupation, and occasionally provide some details of the action in which the individual fell. At present we have a few Rolls of Honour available for Birmingham, and for the rest of the UK. For First World War casualties, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site is an excellent free resource, but does not provide as many details as some of the Rolls of Honour.

Regimental histories are useful in providing background information on the military service of an individual. The histories are usually quite detailed, including maps, drawings and photographs. However, in order to relate these to an individual ancestor, details of his service record need to be known (i.e. in which regiment was he serving, and on what dates). At present we have Regimental Histories available which deal extensively with the First World War (1914-1919) for some of the Battalions of the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire Regiments, and also two for the Birmingham Battalions of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

1918 Absent Voters List for Birmingham

We have just added this list the to the web site in the Electoral Roll section.  As you might expect this list records the 73,000 people who were absent from Birmingham in 1918 and were entitled to vote, and the vast majority were servicemen.  The list records their names, addresses and in most cases their service no., rank and regiment.  It can be searched by name or address from the Electoral Roll Search tab above by limiting the search years from 1918 to 1918.

We have now modified the "Address" search to allow keywords to be entered.  This means that if, for example, you wished to identify all the people who were in The Royal Warwickshire Regiment you can do so by entering the appropriate keyword in the "Address" box.  However, a complication here is that the originals contain abbreviations for the Regiments, and these abbreviations are not standardised throughout.  The Royal Warwickshire Regiment is variously referenced as RWR, R Warwicks, Royal Warks, Royal Warwicks and so on.  I am currently investigating how to construct a simple way to overcome this problem, but in the meantime I hope you find this extension useful.