Common Names

[KGarrad]

Medal Index Cards were kept separately from the Service Records.

[Rena]

As somebody has already mentioned - the records went up in flames and not many survived.  Of all the family of mine that went to war only one service record survived plus a pension record of another ancestor and both of those had evidence of them being in flames.

I found results on the a--ry website was a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, for instance you could ask for "exact" results for "Joe" "Bloggs" and there might be no results or some results - yet if you don't tick the "exact" box the results could show scores of "Joe Bloggs".

A search for William Smith, Royal Horse Artillery brought up over 41,000 results (many of whom didn't have the name "William" either as a first name or a middle name.  With the addition of the father's name as "George" got the results much smaller to go through, as there's only 679. 

You don't actually know where he was born, so it could be in the London area or it may not be and he met his wife whiklst on leave.    If you hover your mouse on the left hand side over the "View Record", a precis of what's on offer is shown.  I hovered over a few in the list and saw two William's were in the London area.  One would have to click on each record to see if any have the father's and wife's names listed.  Unfortunately I don't have a subscription to the site.

Hopefully below is the link to the results page:-

http://www.rootschat.com/links/01him/