WWI Pension Ledgers and Index Cards

[PaulC]

I was excited earlier by an announcement on Facebook that Ancestry have just released this new WWI collection from The Western Front Association... It was less exciting (and not mentioned in said announcement) to find that you will need a premium membership with Fold3 to view images from this new collection, though Ancestry does provide some transcribed details.

UK, WWI Pension Ledgers and Index Cards, 1914-1923

I've sort of known that this was coming for a while. Up until about a year ago the WFA were providing manual look-ups of these records for a fee, but that service was ended after they struck up a deal with Ancestry to digitise the records. I only learned about these records at all quite late and my own look-up request was one of the last to be carried out.

So far only the Naval Ledgers and Merchant Marine Cards appear to have been released, but since this was only part of the WFA collection I assume there's much more to come. The WFA website used to have quite a bit of info about these records but you can still access it via the Wayback Machine:

The Western Front Asscociation: Pension Records (archive)

While I'm not thrilled at the idea of paying extra, I'll probably find this hard to resist when the Army records become available.

 

[PaulC]

I see the WFA have since posted a lengthy annoncement on their own website, but again there seems to be no mention at all that you will need a subscription with Fold3 to view these scans. It all seems very misleading.