Tracing Your WW2 Army Ancestors Workshop
Uncovering a relative’s wartime story can feel like piecing together a tricky puzzle scattered across archives, service records, and long forgotten paperwork with a language all of its own. This workshop guides you through the process of tracing soldiers who served in the British Army during the Second World War, showing you where to look, what survives, and how to interpret what you find.
We’ll explore the major sources for wartime service – personnel files, unit war diaries, casualty lists, medal records, POW documentation, and more, explaining how each fits into the wider picture of a soldier’s experience. You’ll learn how to follow an ancestor from enlistment to demobilisation, how to decode the jargon of military paperwork, and how to place an individual story within the broader context of the Army’s campaigns.
Whether you’re starting from a single photograph or already have a bundle of documents you’re struggling to make sense of, this workshop will equip you with practical methods, research pathways, and the confidence to push your family’s wartime story further.
Pre-booking is required.
Image: Lieutenant A. R. Tanner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
To book, scroll down.
Date
- Sat 26 Sep 2026
Time
- 11:00 - 13:00
Tickets
- £10.00
Location
- L14 London Road Campus, London Road, Reading, Berkshire RG1 5AQ
Category
Organiser
-
The Centre - Berkshire FHS
-
Email
booking@berksfhs.org.uk -
Website
https://berksfhs.org/branches/
Speaker
-
Dr Richard MarksIndustrial, Military and Railway HistorianRichard is a published historian based in Berkshire who specialises in industrial, military, and railway history and also the history of science. His current areas of research are industrial development in the Victorian period, the development of the railway and canal systems in Britain in the mid to late 19th Century and the history of British Rail. He has a PhD in economic history. Richard’s books on British Rail Engineering and the Wantage Tramway Company were both published by Pen and Sword in 2024.