Thank for responding.
Hopefully you can emulate your performance on the Census with these new products then.

I’m just concerned this may be overlooked because you haven’t been able to implement ‘regimental’ searching yet for De Ruvigny, Soldiers Died or National Roll- all datasets that really should be searchable by regiment given the information contained in them and the relative ease of transcribing printed text.

Perhaps there was a licencing issue with these products preventing you from doing more than the minimum you have provided to date, but hopefully you won’t have such an issue with WO96/97.

I look forward to seeing the end results in 2011.

Our minimum aim is to improve upon the searchability, accuracy and indexing of WO363/4.

The prime users of these records at the National Archives are medal collectors, military researchers and regimental historians rather than people searching for their ancestors (although there is obviously significant interest from that area as well). As such, it would be most useful if they were indexed properly.

As was mentioned when these series were put out to bid the “Friends of the National Archives” have been transcribing such files using Soldier’s Name, Place of Birth, Regiment(s), Year of discharge, covered dates of service.

Personally, I would think this should be a minimum requirement, and something like Ancestry’s indexing of the WO363 and WO364 files should be emulated. There they include name, age, birth year, residence location, birth county, regiment, number.

Providing a search based solely on a name just won’t provide much utility for many existing and potential subscribers. I pity the poor researchers who are going to have to look for “John Smith” if all they’ll have is a surname search to wade through.