A new website has been set up by the FindMyPast group called ‘Lives of the First World War‘ (LotFWW). Unfortunately this is a subscription site but subscribers to ‘FindMyPast’ are offered a free one year subscription. The basic idea is to link information about individuals, mainly associated with the military, that were active in the First World War. Most of the first set of records linked are references to the medals awarded to servicemen but they do include other records such as for nurses. The records cover more than the British services.
In my opinion, the website may be usable for looking up an individual soldier (e.g.) but when it comes to adding or correcting data it seemed as though it was designed by someone on their first project. To meet their desires I would be spending the rest of the year or more keying the data.
What I have done is to extract their records (based on the various spellings of the name) and matched these against my records. Out of the initial 180 hits I can identify about 150, although some records may refer to the same person. There are a few cases where the name is wrong plus one case where the person joined the army calling himself Baughan but at the end of the war said it was Vaughan (no birth certificate checks). I’ve produced individual reports on the identified individuals. I’ve added a new entry to my website under the Genealogy ‘Military’ section called ‘Lives in First World War’ (http://www.baughen.co.uk/LivesInWorldWarOneIndex.php ). This contains a list of the names extracted exactly as in the LotFWW website. Selecting the ‘Rec No’ brings up a new page with further details about the individual. This page also has a link to the individual reports (in PDF format) that I produced and therefore you can find out a lot more about the person. If I haven’t been able to identify the individual or it is known that this person is not a Baughen etc. then it will point to a ‘Not Available.pdf” document.
As far as the LotFWW website is concerned I have set up a ‘Community’ called ‘Baughen One Name Study’. All the identified records have been attached to this ‘Community’. I’ve also added an external link to my website for each record that I have been able to match against my data. I have not tried to correct errors etc. or tried to merge information (e.g. where two or more records refer to the same person). Be aware that some of the information displayed on the LotFWW website may not be correct e.g. when a soldier has served in more than one regiment, and he gets a different Service Number for each, the Service Unit and Service Number combination may be wrong.
The LotFWW website is being updated from time to time and therefore I will update my data as I identify and match their records. In the meantime if anyone any further information that helps or adds to the information published please let me know at cliff@baughen.co.uk .