Army of family historians go online to identify unknown soldiers

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission says it has seen a steep rise in cases where amateur genealogists and historians believe they have solved the mystery of unidentified war graves.

War gravestones at Loos Ceremony, France
Around 212,000 unidentified servicemen and women are buried in Commonwealth War Graves cemetaries Credit: Photo: EDDIE MULHOLLAND FOR THE TELEGRAPH

A surge in the popularity of family history and genealogy has led to a tenfold increase in amateur attempts to find the lost resting places of missing soldiers, sailors and airmen, official figures show.

The ability to search old war records easily online and the popularity of family history programmes such as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? have led many to turn amateur historian and try to identify the graves of missing ancestors.

The number of identification cases sent to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where someone believes they have worked out who is in an unidentified grave, has risen nearly ten fold in the past decade.

The Commission said it has already had 31 cases this year where someone believes they have solved the mystery of who lies in an unmarked grave. In 2014 there were only 18 cases, while at the start of last decade there were only a handful. In 2003 there were only four such cases and only two in 2004.

Hundreds of thousands of members of the Forces still have no known graves after the First and Second World Wars. Large numbers of bodies were never identified and lie only with headstones marked “Known unto God”.

But with millions of war records put online in recent years and the ease of searching them, there has been a dramatic increase in people turning detective and attempting to work out what happened to their lost relatives.

Tyne Cot cemetery in Ypres, Belgium

Tyne Cot cemetery in Ypres, Belgium (Alamy)

Peter Francis, a spokesman for the Commission, said: “Without doubt we have seen interest increase over the last five or ten years and in particular following things like the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are.

“I think the centenary of the First World War and the anniversaries of the Second World War are part of it, we have seen a huge upsurge in interest.

“You get family members and family historians who look at these records and start to look a bit in depth and look at what regiments or squadrons were doing, or where planes were flying.

“You also get amateur historians who look at that and particularly when you get an unknown that has a bit of information to it.

“The fact that records are now digitised and available and you can put them into spreadsheets and crunch the data means people can make some powerful cases.”

Each case is investigated by the Commission and if necessary passed on to the Ministry of Defence which still runs a unit looking for the remains of personnel.

If it appears that the identity of an unnamed grave has been convincingly decided, then headstones are changed to include the name and a rededication service is held.

Around 212,000 unidentified servicemen and women are buried in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries, while the names of almost 760,000, including sailors, can be found on memorials to the missing.

Mr Francis said the centenary of the First World War and the recent 70th and 75th anniversaries of key Second World War events had seen a large increase in interest in war graves.

He said visitors to some Western Front battlefields had increased more than 80 per cent in the past year. The Commission has also scanned in 300,000 documents from its archives in the past five years.