Welcome to a website I have created about the South Wales Borderers in 1914. There is a lot of detail on my motivations for creating this website in the FAQ. It is hoped that for an individual trying to research an individual soldier, this website should help to inform what has survived for him, and his colleagues, in terms of source documents. It is also hoped that by putting this information in the public domain, it will be of use to postgrads too.
It could be the case this is the first time that a 1914 Star medal roll has been published online and put into the public domain.
The datasets are comprised of two elements. For starters, the medal roll data is there for the eight groups of Regulars, the three groups of Special Reservists, and the two groups of Recruits upon outbreak. The second element – is some metadata on what records are known to have survived.
For the 1st Battalion datasets, anything on the left of a table where the entire column is in dark blue font is 1914 Star related, and anything to the right of it in black font is the second element.
It is likewise believed this is the only instance where the names of all men identified to be in a county infantry regiment at the outbreak of war has been published online and in the public domain.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank general geek and bad pun meister Gareth J Davis for his assistance in getting me started with this website. He too has a website, on the theme of microcomputing in the 1980s which can be accessed here:
https://retroblog.garethdav.is/index.php/tag/networking/
Chronology/ what’s new
31 May 2021 – Addition of “Re-enlistments in 1919” which explained the mystery of soldiers being renumbered. Of greater significance, and the outcome of a lot of hard work, is the “1911 Census data” that I have added. This is a derivation that will be of interest to anyone researching an individual they have found on the census.
15 Jan 2021 – Updated the Other Ranks of the 2nd Battalion, to have more data fields, in particular the trio of “parish/settlement-district-county” where the data is available. Information on whether a surviving service record, or entry on Silver War Badge roll is now recorded, just like for 1st Battalion soldiers.
15 Nov 2020 – What with it being close to Remembrance Day, I concluded the analysis I had done on those who died, and those who were medically discharged. I uploaded the data into Tableau, and created some data visualisations. The links are below
Mons Star veterans and 1st Bn SWB deaths
Tsingtao veterans and 2nd Bn SWB deaths
From each dataset, I have been able to derive more than one data visualisation, and you can also see some older files that I had created, too.
27 Jul 2020 – Medal roll info for men of the 2nd Battalion has been captured. It was a very lengthy process to gather the data, and revealed a lot of inconsistency between various administrators of the British Army when they compiled the medal rolls!
10 Jul 2020 – One question asked is “How Welsh was the composition of the regiment? Using the type of data available from this website allows analysis to take place. Here is a link to the forum posts of an individual (the late Martin Gillott) with whom I have shared some of this data, and has performed such analysis on a number of regiments
https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014833/http://www.victorianwars.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=12952&start=45
20 Jun 2020 – I have amended some birth dates for some men, and marked these updates with red font. In addition, I have tried to find supplemental info for those men who died in WW1 where I did not have a birth date. I have three groups of supplemental info, which have been added to this website.
11 Jun 2020 – Contact page issue has now been remedied.
08 Jun 2020 – In preparation for adding new material to this website, it has come to light that the contact page has not been functioning for the past six months. I apologise if I have not been in contact. I am looking to get this fixed asap.
08 Oct 2019 – Added to “supplemental” are extra details on 58 men who died in WW1, and for whom I now have their birth year, address and next of kin details.
03 Sep 2019 – A “Supplemental” section is added, the first item to be added is a list of men with medical sheets, detailing their wounds and admissions to hospital in 1914-15.
24 Aug 2018 – Royal Fleet Reservists from 1914 have been added to this site. The men in question have index cards in addition to their Naval records.
13 Aug 2018 – The names of the men of the Brecknock Battalion (Other Ranks) awarded the 1914-15 Star have been added to the website.
10 Aug 2018 – A new page on POWs has been added. This contains capture dates, based upon source data, or alternatively assumed dates based on existing data. If a man served up to 26 September 1914, their service with the battalion would cease owing to being captured.
23 Jan 2018 – Where known, the date of transfer to the Army Reserve has been added. This should be useful in determining whether a soldier was serving with the Colours, or was in the Army Reserve, at the outbreak of war in 1914. In addition, the “others” page now has a list of theatres of war.
11 Jan 2018 – The metadata element has now been added for the “others” as referenced below.
27 Dec 2917 – As well as 1914 Star recipients of the 1st Battalion, and the men in China of the 2nd Battalion, there were others. I have now added the names of those other men, about 300 men in total.
09 Dec 2017 – Unsure how to capture some of this data? The new page “Accessing the data tables” will give some pointers on importing into Excel (two methods), Google sheets or Open Office Calc spreadsheets.
07 Dec 2017 – Website is added to the British Library’s selective list of UK Websites
04 Dec 2017 – The website gets mentioned in an Imperial War Museum newsletter.
29 Nov 2017 – All subgroups for the 1st Battalion now include not only medal roll info, but also further metadata as to what is available for each man, and enlistment dates where known.
18 Nov 2017 – Each subgroup for the 1st Battalion now has a “featured man”, and a biography of that person. The data table appears further down the page.
08 Nov 1917 – Added a contact form via Pirate Forms. Once the domain was registered with Google reCAPTCHA, it worked! (How to add reCaptcha to a form in Pirate Forms)
07 Nov 1917 – The website’e existence is announced to a wider audience via the Facebook page of the Regiment of the Royal Welsh at Brecon.
https://www.facebook.com/royal.welsh.museum/posts/1426062234168917
05 Nov 2017 – Completed datasets uploaded for Regular 6, 7 & 8 datasets. These pertain to soldiers who fought in France in 1914, and enlisted as Regular soldiers between Autumn 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914
07 Nov 1917 – Completed dataset for Recruits upon War Outbreak 2 (of 2) uploaded into the live environment
26 Oct 2017 – The site goes from “test” to “live” status.
23 Oct 1917 – Completed dataset for Recruits upon War Outbreak 1 (of 2) uploaded into the test environment
Aug 2017 – The data for the three subsets of Special Reservists in the 1st Battalion is collated.
09 Nov 2010 – My research is at its beginning, into a family member who was in the South Wales Borderers. A subsequent e-mail to the regimental museum would see me start to research men with a 9000 series of service number over the coming months and years…….