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Canadian Great War Project

Heilan Lass

Heilan Lass

LostCousins Member
This Canadian Great War Project is endeavouring to identify every Canadian or other nationality who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War 1. Work on the database is ongoing with over 151,955 entries of individual soldiers (at the time of this post).

The site can be searched by name here, and the sort of information you can find includes Unit in which served, place and date of enlistment, next of kin, date and place of birth, cause of death, etc.
 
The Great Canadian War Project is back on line, it has not been updated much but what it has is brilliant so here's the link
 
The Great Canadian War Project has set up a partnership with the University of Victoria with a new search engine which is worth looking at in its beta version. You can now search for a soldier using 14 parameters. Ideally you would use at least one beside surname and I was able to narrow down a search where there was a missing digit from the soldier number. The search results provide a link to the C.E.F. records and to other information that volunteers had shared about individual soldiers.
 
The GCWP now links to the new version of the CWGC (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) records , check out this example. Sadly their old format will not link to the new version.
 
Just a reminder that the links to the original site are still viable. It's a very useful way to check out the basic details for many of those who served in WWI. One of the most useful for my personal projects is WWI Canadian Nurses particularly as most of the links to the digitised CEF records work.
 
Although it's still a beta version the Canadian Great War Project at its new home is very reliable. I use it for all my on line references as it's very convenient for anyone not familiar with the various record sources. Here's a French Canadian Soldier .
 
Update, this is still the best one place source for tracing men and women who served with Canadian forces in WWI .
There has been some progress on the war diary project and I still generally recommend the University of Victoria version.
There are a few odds and ends which haven't moved to the new format and I still use the old version for text searches
 
Heilan Lass said:
This Canadian Great War Project is endeavouring to identify every Canadian or other nationality who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War 1. Work on the database is ongoing with over 151,955 entries of individual soldiers (at the time of this post).

The site can be searched by name here, and the sort of information you can find includes Unit in which served, place and date of enlistment, next of kin, date and place of birth, cause of death, etc.
Click to expand...

As I have recently found a relative who served in the Canadian army I just took a look at this website and did a search for him :) the amount of information I found on him was astounding so thank you very much Heilan Lass for this tip.
 
I'm not clear whether this website has information over and above what is available on the Library & Archives Canada website - does anyone know?
 
The website states that: "This site, like any site on the Great War, relies heavily on the documents database of Library and Archives Canada and other government agencies. What distinguishes this project is the transcription of those records and the normalization of their data elements by the tireless work of our members, students and supporters."
 
IanL said:
The website states that: "This site, like any site on the Great War, relies heavily on the documents database of Library and Archives Canada and other government agencies. What distinguishes this project is the transcription of those records and the normalization of their data elements by the tireless work of our members, students and supporters."
Click to expand...
My interpretation of that was that the site is primarily a finding aid. I've never had any difficulty finding military records at the LAC site, but perhaps others have?
 
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