The Surrey History Trust.
Recruitment Registers - CD
Description
Surname Index & Extracts CD published by the Surrey History Trust, 2005. This first CD from the Surrey History Trust contains some unique information. Recruitment registers for the period of the First World War are extremely as such records were supposed to have been destroyed after the war. It covers the period 1908 to 1933 giving details of just under 85,000 soldiers. Of these registers, all but one volume relate to the 31st Regimental District, based at Kingston, including the Borough of Croydon and the last register to the 2nd Regimental District, based at Guildford.
Contents
The 44 volumes, which comprise the Surrey Recruitment Register, cover the period 1908 to mid 1933. The volumes are not sequential: Volumes 35-38, or parts thereof cover the pre-war period, whilst Volumes 30-34 & 42 -43 cover the post war period. The rest cover the war period of 1914-1918. The Surrey History Centre introduction to the Registers is included on the CD. It details the “Provenance” of the Collection, the area of coverage, the reason for the establishment of the Registers, their change in format throughout the War period, an explanation of the categories used under the “Derby scheme” and also the Medical categories. Detail is also included as to the period of coverage of each of the 44 volumes.
Each volume is made up of about 200 pages of Army form B303 - though some have unused pages. Each page or form has 26 columns and there are at least two versions with different ordering of the columns across the pages. Sometimes a column was unused or was used to record information other than that printed at the head of the column. Sample images from the Register are included on the CD.
Some of the information about Army administration, such as “Recruiter or Recruiting Agent” , “Attesting Officer”, “Witness”, or “By whom Finally Approved”, was judged to be of marginal interest. Omission of these items lessened the task of extracting information. All personal information relating to each recruit has been extracted.
The Compilers of these Registers made extensive use of abbreviations which are not consistent either within a single volume or between volumes. For example in the Regimental posting the East Surrey Regiment may have been recorded as E. Surrey Regt. ESR, E.S.R., or E. Sry. To overcome this inconsistency it was decided to expand all abbreviations to a common format - for each Regiment. Thus the East Surrey Regiment is always shown as such whatever was entered originally.
This approach runs the risk that an abbreviation might be expanded incorrectly, “SLI” is a case in point, as this could refer to either the “Shropshire Light Infantry” or to the “Somerset Light Infantry”, However it was considered to be a risk worth taking. To minimise errors extensive use was made of Army Regimental web sites.
The Regimental names are naturally those prevailing at the time. For example the Royal prefix to the Army Service Corps is not applicable prior to 1919.
Extensive use of abbreviations was also made in those parts of Form B303 relating to a recruits physical attributes. These too have been expanded, although, due to space considerations, to a lesser in respect of “Distinctive Marks”, for which there are some lengthy entries. Use has been made of a “+” sign in this field to indicate that there is additional information in the original registers.
In many of the 44 volumes a name & address was usually recorded in the “Remarks” column the significance of this entry seems to vary over time. In the pre 1914 volumes the name & address is that of the person providing the recruit’s character reference. In the period 1914 - 1918 the address given could well be that of the recruit. In the post war period the information given is usually the name & address of the next of kin, although in some Instances it is that of the person supplying the recruit’s character reference. The Introduction by The Surrey History Centre (included on this CD) gives the exact dates covered by each volume.
The post war volumes sometimes include within the “Accepted/Rejected” column references to various Army Orders, and are often linked to a term of service less than the normal 12 years. Copies of these Army Orders are held at The National Archives at Kew.
