Military Monday: Researching the KOYLI collection
In our last blog post we talked about the work that’s going to go into the new KOYLI collections project. The work our volunteers are doing is being split into three areas: research, digitisation, and outreach. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring each of these roles, including why they’re important, what the work looks like, and how you can get involved if it sounds like something you’d enjoy.
The first of the three roles, and one that has started already, is our research volunteering. Since the collections project is all about creating a research space where people can explore our collections, having a detailed understanding of everything in the collection is rather important. With the initial focus on our medals, volunteers are working to build biographies of every soldier who received any of the medals in the collection. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, so it isn’t a small job!
The volunteers have lots of sources of information available to them. If you’ve ever done any family history research yourself, you’ll know how useful websites like Ancestry can be in finding older government documents. Our researchers use sites like these and the National Archives to access historic censuses, birth, marriage, and death records, and election registers. These can all tell you a lot about people’s personal and family lives, and we can use military documents like enlistment paperwork and medal records to fill in any gaps. Newspaper archives can provide details of specific things like births, marriages, and wartime events.
They also have access to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry’s regimental diaries, the regimental newsletter ‘The Bugle’, and various other logs and records that formed the regiment’s day-to-day administration. These are fabulous sources of information that tell us where battalions were and when throughout the regiment’s history, and cover everything from fighting to football matches. While censuses and enlistment papers tend to give our volunteers facts about the soldiers, it’s diaries, letters, postcards, and newsletters that tell us the most about their lives within the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.
Once all this information has been collated and recorded, the researchers then use it to write up the biographies that will be accessible to everyone visiting our medal room when it opens.
Our researcher volunteers all work together on these biographies, sharing advice and approaches, and working with museum staff to get access to documents they need. Many of them come in once a week, but we’re keen to offer as flexible hours as we practically can.
If research volunteering sounds like something you’d be interested in, please email us to learn more.
All images of objects from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Collection are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), credit to Heritage Doncaster.