Over the coming weeks and months I will be building various medal guides for both the Second and First World Wars and uploading them to Slideshare.net Here is the first one – A guide to British and Commonwealth Campaign Medals of WW2. I hope you like it and find it of interest!!   WW2 British [...]

Researching WW2 family members can be awkward at the best of times. There are things that can be done – my blog post ‘Researching Your WW2 Ancestors‘ covers the most common research avenues, however, for service records and medal information you have to be a direct family descendant, and you need to know some basic [...]

I read today with utter disgust the sad tale of the 91 year old WW2 sailor who has had his medals stolen from his family home. Great Granddad John Robson found on Monday that his medals were stolen, just a matter of weeks before the nation (or at least most of the nation) stops to [...]

We have a new Facebook page – www.facebook.com/militaryresearchUK – and we would love it if you join us. On our page you will find pictures, photos and stories from our military history, plus tips and tricks on how to track down your military ancestors. We have over 800 ‘likes’ already and lots of interaction going [...]

Earlier this week saw the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Royal Flying Corps, so as a tip of the hat to the pioneers of British military aviation, I thought I would write a few words on how to uncover your aviation heroes. But first a history of the RFC in about 3 paragraphs: [...]

To celebrate the soft launch of my new website project – www.thegreatwar100.com – and to raise some much-needed money for soldiers old and new, I have produced a range of t-shirts (cue wild applause..) For those that know me, you will recognise the image that is being used on the t-shirt! They have been produced [...]

The English Football Association are in talks with FIFA to allow the England team to wear a Poppy on their shirts during the game on Saturday against Spain. Evidently FIFA’s regulations do not permit international shirts to carry any ‘political, religious or commercial messages’. This indeed is a very noble pledge by FIFA, but I [...]

To celebrate and remember the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches, here are a few interesting facts about this most historic and heroic day. The codename given by the Allies for the overall  invasion was ‘Operation Overlord’. The invasion took place over 61miles of beaches. The beaches were split into 5 sectors and given the [...]

With the sad but inevitable news that Claude Choules, the last surviving veteran from WW1 passed away earlier this week, I guess the press will be full of articles about their lives, television programmes dedicated to their memory and a renewed interest, for a while, in the “Great War”. That we remember those who fought [...]

A project to trace hundreds of children who were displaced by the Holocaust has been launched by am American museum. The campaign, run by the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum is calling for information about more than 1100 children, depicted in a series of photographs which can be seen online. The photos were taken at refuge [...]