World War 1 Soldier's Pension Records

Ancestry.com has recently undertaken a major new project to digitize First World War soldiers' pension records, and stage one of the project has now gone live.  This initial set comprises 50,485 records from naval pension ledgers and Merchant Marine cards.  Ancestry has added searchable transcriptions of the records, with 18,270 digital images of the originals available to subscribers of Ancestry's partner website Fold3.  The record release was made possible by Ancestry's partnership with the Western Front Association (WFA).

This first tranche of records consists of cards used by the Ministry of Pensions to monitor payments to injured merchant navy veterans or the families of the dead. The naval ledgers, meanwhile, list married men in the Royal Navy who were lost at sea, and whose widows and children were eligible for pensions.  Both sets of records can include the seaman's name, rank, service number, date of birth, date of death or injury and the ship he served on.  They also list each widow's name, date of marriage, and the names and dates of birth of any children.

In November 2012, the WFA acquired an archive of approximately 6.5 million First World War pension records index cards and ledgers from the Ministry of Defence.  In December 2017, it announced that scanning and indexing of the records was underway, following a deal with Ancestry. 

These records kept track of pensions paid to soldiers, sailors and airmen injured in the First World War and also recorded payments to the widows and dependents of men who were killed.  They are one of the largest surviving sets of records of British forces in the First World War, since many records and individual dossiers were destroyed in air raids in 1940.

Ancestry plans to upload more records before Remembrance Day on 11 November and to complete the set by early 2019.  WFA is also planning to allow its members to access the records via its website without an Ancestry or Fold3 subscription.