Help searching the Militia Attestations Index (once logged in)
| Search by |
You can search by last name, first name, and county or country of birth. Note that though you cannot search on year, the records cover the relatively limited period of around 50 years, from 1860 to 1913, though this varies with the regiment (see table).
Please note that the county of birth shown tends to be rather erratic, especially for the home counties, with Middlesex, for example, often being entered instead of Surrey. We have corrected many of these so that the county search field will usually - but not always - be accurate. Note also that in the "Birth County" field, "Middlesex" often includes places in City of London and "London" does not refer only to places in the City of London, "London" being used arbitrarily in the originals for London-Middlesex and London-City. If you are searching for men from the London area, you should include London, Middlesex and also Surrey (for many places south of the Thames).
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| Available Regiments |
This dataset currently indexes the attestations for recruits to the Cheshire Regiment, Cornwall & Devon Miners RGA, Devon RGA, Dorset Regiment, Essex Regiment, Hampshire & Isle of Wight RGA, Kent RGA, Lincolnshire Regiment, Middlesex Regiment, Norfolk Regiment, Suffolk Regiment, Suffolk RGA, West Surrey Regiment, York & Lancaster Regiment, Yorkshire RGA, Edinburgh RGA, Fife RGA, Forfarshire & Kincardine RGA, South East Scotland RGA, West Scotland RGA. There are now a hundred thousand militia attestations indexed on The Origins Network covering the whole of the British Isles, for the period of late 19th & early 20th centuries.
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| National Archives Reference |
The original documents are held at The National Archives, London. The index records include the information necessary to find the original records yourself at The National Archives (see Source Records Archives).
The National Archives Reference Number identifies the class - always WO96 - and the box (the number after the slash) within which the attestation papers are stored; eg WO96/1441. The Sequence Number was generated from the order of the documents within each box at the time the index was created; the documents should all be - more or less - in alphabetical order. When the documents were indexed by Jenifer Edmunds, some names were out of alphabetical order but she was not allowed to re-sort them and could not be sure that they might be re-sorted later. So if you do not find a document in the order shown in the index data, then look for it in the "proper", alphabetical, order or look for it at the top of the box.
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| NameX |
NameX is a proprietary name-matching tool which allows you to find family records for names which have common variations in spelling or which may have been spelled incorrectly on some records.
Click here for more help.
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