Early in 2014, the BBC reported that the last wills and testaments of twenty-six thousand Scottish soldiers from the First World War were going online. Eventually, I ran every name on my master list through the search function at the National Records of Scotland website, and came up with seven hits: William Charles Allan, James Brown, Francis Eunson, John Logie, George A.C. Manson, John Kirkness Maxwell, and Ian Merrilees. The first six were Gordon Highlanders who died in the conflict (all of them Privates, save for Lance Corporal Manson), while Private Ian Merrilees was the son of one of the most noteworthy Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, Archibald Merrilees.
I checked a couple of websites - the NRS website, and Scotland's People, and eventually learned two things. First, the records are not available online. Second, you have to pay for them - in fact, you have to pay just to have the NRS staff ascertain how many pages of records your total order constitutes, and how much that will cost, and then that search fee goes toward your actual order fee. If you ask me, both of these developments are extremely silly. Why even announce their release if they're not being made available online? As the BBC article claimed:
The last wishes of 26,000 fallen Scottish soldiers will be made available online by the National Records of Scotland.So, the claim that the wills are "digitally archived" and "available online" were just a few more falsitudes from the lips of (now-)former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. Beyond that: why charge for hundred-year-old documents that are held by the Scottish government? So much for the myth of an oil-funded tartan socialist wonderland...
[...]
Welcoming the project, First Minister Alex Salmond said: "This year, when we mark the centenary of the start of the Great War, we reflect on the sacrifices made by generations of service men and women, including those currently serving.
"Digitally archiving all 26,000 wills online presents a unique glimpse into the lives of the individuals who fought and fell for our freedom."
Anyway.
Despite my annoyance that the files weren't just available via the web, and weren't free, and (as I eventually learned) couldn't even be E-mailed, I ponied up the cash (around $25-30 when all was said and done) for the NRS staff to do the search for the documents, and then to have the records mailed across the Atlantic on a very smart-looking "Scotland's People" flash drive. I want to make a point of noting that despite my annoyance, the staff at the NRS were extremely professional, polite, and efficient; the Royal Mail and the U.S. Postal Service not quite so much, but I'm used to that by now. The documents - only about five megabytes of files - arrived, and save for the basically unreadable will of Private Merrilees, most of them are in great shape and entirely legible.
The soldiers in question, pretty much to a man, are individuals for whom we only had a few bits of basic information prior to the release and discovery of those wills. We basically have only the following information about many of the men on the list: name, rank, unit (battalion within the regiment, or other units in which they served before or after), date of death, age at time of death, final resting place, home, service number, potentially the location where they enlisted, the URL for any relevant websites (e.g. the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website for those killed in action), and that's about it - some of those data points aren't even confirmed. Most have an accompanying medal card, and we have photos of more of them than I would have expected at the outset, but that's still a pretty thin historical record. So, I'm quite excited about these wills, because they provide more of these men's stories. After a break for emergent operational requirements (work projects at the office, and Christmas/New Year requirements at the house), research and writing will resume on January 5th. Stay tuned.
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