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Leinster Soldiers Project
The Association has embarked upon a project to develop a
database of the soldiers and officers who served in the Leinster Regiment
throughout its incorporation from the 100th & 109th Regiments of Foot to the
time that the Regiment was disbanded as a Regiment of the Line in 1922. This
mammoth project is being coordinated by Don Dickson with the help of the
Association's members and historians. When completed the results will be
published online in our free to view database.
There are a number of documented original sources held at the
National Archives in Kew, London, including very rare copies of the Regiments
Pay & Muster Rolls of the 19th century. For records of the very late 19th
century and early 20th century the task is much more difficult because of the
loss by fire of official War Department (now Ministry of Defence) personnel
records during WW2. There remain some sources, such as the Medal Records Index
for WW1 medal awards to soldiers who served in "conflict" areas, and a few
surviving personnel documents, however of the vast majority of men who served in
the Regiment there are no official records.
The Association's team are therefore collecting information
through a number of means.
- Pay and Muster Lists: These are held at the
National Archives in Kew, London. They are very old original handwritten
manuscript books originally kept by the Battalion or unit Paymaster and
regularly returned to the War Office. These books are too fragile to be
scanned and volunteers are photographing the pages in these books, then
slowly transcribing each entry into a worksheet (spreadsheet) for subsequent
incorporation into a database.
- Personal Information: There are many descendents
of Leinster Regiment soldiers alive today who retain information about their
ancestors. Many soldiers who retired from or left the Regiment went on to
live full lives and we believe that their families remain proud of the
contribution their ancestors made through service in the Leinster Regiment.
Drawing on the information collected by the coordinators personal web site,
we are now collating a huge backlog of information for incorporation into
the database. Personal family records or documents are a very valuable
source of information and any person who had a former relative that served
in the Regiment is encouraged to contact us.
- Medal Rolls: There are a number of medal rolls that are
archived at the National Archives in Kew London and these include the WW1
Medal Index Cards (MICs) that were created by the Army Medal Office towards
the end of the First World War. The cards record an individual's medal
entitlement, their rank, their Regiment, sometimes their battalion and often
the first theatre of war in which they served. To read more about and search
the archive on WW1 Medals
click here (opens in a new window) If you have a subscription to
Ancestry then you can search and view MICs as part of your subscription.
Soldiers who were serving in the Regiment during the Boar War will have
received the Queens South Africa and Kings South Africa Medals unless they
remained on Home Service. The detail of those records are kept on Microfilm
at the National Archives. There are no current government plans to digitise
the Boar War Medal records so volunteers are photographing the pages in
these books, then slowly transcribing each entry into a worksheet
(spreadsheet) for subsequent incorporation into a database.
Would you like to help our project, maybe you have some
information that you can donate to the project, or maybe you would like to
volunteer to transcribe the soldiers data from photographs of the records into
our database? If you think you can help click this link
interested in
helping the project?
Contact the project
coordinator?
Go to Leinster Soldiers
Died in the Great War database
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