WIREDGOV

We have announced that we have awarded Ancestry®, a contract to digitise the first tranche of Ministry of Defence service personnel records. Both parties are looking forward to working to make these important records accessible online.

Gemma Maclagan Ram, Commercial Director at The National Archives said:

“Widening access to records is very important to us and we are pleased that this partnership with Ancestry will allow people to look at these records in the comfort of their own homes. We know how important these records are to military groups, veterans and family genealogists and we are working with Ancestry to ensure that they are accessible online as early as possible.”

This contract covers the first four groups of non-officer British Army service records: approximately three million files in total, amounting to an estimated 36 million images. We anticipate that the digitisation will take over four years, so from late 2024 Ancestry will publish in tranches, when each series of records is ready for publication online.

Find out more about the records and digitisation project.