OGHAP: Primary Sources

When I was studying history as an undergrad, one of my professors was a borderline deranged lunatic on the topic of primary sources. For the uninitiated, primary sources are pieces of historical evidence that constitute eyewitness or participant accounts. If you submitted a paper to him (I think I submitted a total of four) that didn't rest largely on the testimony of primary sources, you were going to have a bad time. As I've researched the service of the Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, I've found myself making use of multiple primary sources.

Medal index cards are often the only remaining official record of a particular soldier's service. (Most First World War personnel service records were destroyed in the Blitz.) My contact in Orkney has diligently assisted me in identifying and procuring the medal cards for the soldiers in question. A few months ago, the BBC published this guide, which includes a guide to reading a medal card. These documents have been extremely valuable in establishing or confirming some basic facts about the various Orcadian Gordon Highlanders.

Earlier this year, I discussed my efforts to procure soldiers' wills for seven Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from the National Archives of Scotland. Since I wrote that post, my contact back in Orkney discovered several additional Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, and one has a will. My good buddy, CN Constable, has agreed to get it for me since the last effort took about a month and cost far more than it needed to.

The United Kingdom's National Archives (known colloquially as "Kew") are releasing and/or digitizing many documents for the Great War's centenary. One such effort is Operation War Diary, about which I learned a couple of months ago from one of War on the Rocks' (W)archives posts. (Here's more information about Operation War Diary.) Since information about many of the Orcadian Gordons is so sparse, I thought that this might be a good way to find information about the various battalions of the Gordon Highlanders, and possibly even about individual Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from my own roster. I put off participating in OWD until I had some time, at which point I discovered that none of the diaries available for tagging pertain to the Gordon Highlanders. However, Kew has a total of thirty-eight individual war diaries, ranging in length from about twelve pages to nearly six hundred. I expect to procure these records in the near future. The National Archives has a good webinar (also available, albeit less illustrative, as a podcast) about how to search for and correlate the various documents available in the archives for the purposes of historical research. I'm not sure I'll have need for more than medal cards and war diaries, but it might be interesting to see what additional resources might be available to allow me to continue researching this and related topics in the future.

I've worked with primary sources before, but this has been my first opportunity to do much archival history. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, and once I get the book published I may see if my undergraduate alma mater might be interested in having me out to lecture about my experiences doing historical research outside of academia.