Researching WW2 Armed Forces & Civilian Casualties (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Friday, February 01, 2013, 03:08 (4316 days ago) @ terry2424

Hi Terry,
thanks for your interesting query, sadly my straight answer is "I don't know".
That's largely as most of my military research has been WW1 and earlier; I have no direct family experience of WW2 casualties plus the records being more recent are very difficult to obtain thro official MoD routes unless one is a direct close relative. My past experiences & tonight's initial internet searches haven't shownup any form of formal Certificate - I presume you mean something along the lines of the socalled "Death Plaque" issued by the Government after WW1 ?. http://www.heroesofhull.co.uk/pages/memories/WW1/DeathPlaque.php

Hopefully other forum members can help out ?

Meanwhile as you probably know there are still other ways if you want to research a casualty of WW2. This site gives an idea of what records are available, but being written by a professional researcher it doesn't give many clues as to how/where...
http://www.militaryarchiveresearch.com/BritishPoW.htm#World War 2

A good start for beginners is shown on this usefull guide http://www.ww2cemeteries.co.uk/research.htm

The Commonweath War Graves Commission website is truly excellent and free to use, so clearly the startpoint, altho be warned their search engine is a definite example of "less is more" to obtain best results (inputting too much data can sometimes erroneously show no findings ?!)
http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead.aspx
Some usefull background to the CWGC is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CWGC#Second_World_War

The National Archive is also worth searching, again its best to only enter surnames and firstname initial at first, then flog thro the potentially long list of findings - this search engine also has a frustrating knack of not finding a person at all, even if you input the correct full name & regiment etc first time around... If you have it the person's number is the best element to search with.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/looking-for-person/war-deaths.htm

The excellent British Red Cross Website may also help you, see
http://www.redcross.org.uk/What-we-do/Finding-missing-family/Other-organisations/Missin...
Its worth mentioning that altho there are extensive records for POWs from the European war theatre, records of those captured in the Far East are far more sketchy to put it mildly.

As with this FoD Forum, the following is a very friendly & helpfull speciallist forum which I strongly recommend; searching it can be a very usefull source of reference, but a polite enquiry may well gain free info from a paying subscriber to one of the speciallist Military websites, so you'll maybe gain free access to the official British Army WW2 Roll of Honour, etc.
http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/

There are of course subscription websites that may give quicker and more complete answers and it seems not too pricey, an example is http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/

I believe all UK Public libraries offer free access to Ancestry.co.uk, this contains some military records, my local (Middlesex) libraries also offer access to the Find My Past site which carries different and often more comprehensive Military Record sets.

Finally, simply Googling a person's surname along with their unit, say, may occasionally yield surprisingly good results; military history is a very popular subject and there are huge amounts of detailed information available online across several speciallist forums and websites.

Hope this helps, good luck !