Army

Red Cross Digitises Records From First World War

Over 90,000 people volunteered for the British Red Cross at home and overseas during the First World War. Whether these volunteers were nursing dying soldiers, driving ambulances through the trenches or searching for the missing, the Red Cross voluntary aid detachments (VADs) played a significant part in helping to care for the sick and wounded.

On October 20th, the British Red Cross launched an online archive which made a unique record of their work accessible to all - a collection of 236,000 VAD personnel index cards.

These cards, now 100 years old, include VAD’s names and details such as where they worked and what tasks they did, providing an irreplaceable source of historical information about who the VADs were and what they did.

The archive will be available to the public free of charge at www.redcross.org.uk/ww1 and can be searched by relatives of VADs and historians alike. The creation of a digital archive will unearth new information about civilians who volunteered during the First World War – such as how many volunteers came from certain parts of the country. Details about VAD’s tasks and working hours will help to establish previously unknown details about their day-to-day work.

A total of 90,000 civilians served as VADs under the Joint War Committee during the war, including authors Agatha Christie and Vera Brittain, who wrote of her work as a Red Cross nurse in Testament of Youth.

The online archive has been produced with the help of over 250 volunteers, managed by the British Red Cross and Kingston University following a successful application for funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

PICTURE CREDIT: Red Cross