Incomplete and often inaccurate but can add useful details if you are lucky.
National Roll of the Great War and De Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour
Two privately-produced rolls listing men who served, which between them list thousands of men (most with a few lines of biography and in De Ruvigny’s many with photographs) but which merely scratch the surface in terms of proportion of men who were included.
- Details of how the two were compiled are meagre but it appears both were by subscription (that is, the man or his family paid for an entry).
- The National Roll is solidly an “other ranks” publication, de Ruvigny’s mainly officers. The National Roll in particular is not wholly reliable as a source of military information, but it does give a background and importantly it has an address for the soldier. It went out of business after covering perhaps 10% of the country.
- The National Roll is now available as a searchable database at Ancestry or in printed form from The Naval & Military Press.
- The early volumes of De Ruvigny’s roll can be downloaded as whole volumes from archive.org.
The Bond of Sacrifice
A privately-produced roll listing officers who lost their lives in the first years of the war.
- Can be downloaded as a complete volume (free) from archive.org.