Family Historian User Group

I am indebted to Martin Briscoe of various Mailing Lists for this information.

Anyone who's ever tried to locate a regiment of the British Army in some arbitrary year should be grateful to know that various newspapers ran a feature "Stations of the British Army". If you go to your favourite newspaper search and look for that phrase, with luck you may find an article for your time period - or ones bracketing it.

I tried it on FindMyPast and got a fair selection of articles - I got back to the 1820s with the "Cumberland Pacquet, and Ware's Whitehaven Advertiser" (no I don't know what a "Pacquet" was...) while there were some in 1912 in the "War Office Times and Naval Review" when they seemed to do it monthly, there were only 4 or 5 in the previous 2 years, but that might be an indexing issue. I can't see any post-WW1 articles.

Formats vary - anyone wondering why regiments are listed non-alphabetically should realise they are in order of precedence, based on the original regimental numbers (e.g. the Cheshire Regiment was the 22nd).

Also, it seems to cover just cavalry regiments and infantry battalions so if you want artillery brigades, you're out of luck - in that case I'd have to revert to my previous method of looking in Army List.

Thanks, I may well dig.

Are you aware of The Long Long Trail run by Chris Baker who is/was to the Great War Forum what Jane is to FHUG?

From his Army page you can look up a unit (during WW1 and the immediately following years) - a regiment or a corps - and find out where various sub units (e.g. Infantry battalions or cavalry squadrons) were in the Order of Battle (Orbat) - the Army Hierarchy and then see where their Divisions or Corps were geographically.

For WW1 it is the most comprehensive source I know outside the actual documents in The National Archives at Kew.

Adrian, I think this fits better in the Research forum, so I'm moving it!

David - yes, I've spent many hours on Chris Baker's forum. The ORBAT stuff is useful when you're trying to reverse engineer a soldier's date of arrival in France to work out what unit they might have been in.

Helen - move away! (I've already forgotten where I posted it! )

Great tip - definitely going to try it.

Thanks for sharing

Teresa

AdrianBruce wrote: ↑

17 Aug 2022 13:21

I am indebted to Martin Briscoe of various Mailing Lists for this information.

Anyone who's ever tried to locate a regiment of the British Army in some arbitrary year should be grateful to know that various newspapers ran a feature "Stations of the British Army". If you go to your favourite newspaper search and look for that phrase, with luck you may find an article for your time period - or ones bracketing it.