If we’re going to gather information about Mosman’s WWI servicepeople, first we have to find out who they were. The names on the Mosman War Memorial and George Franki’s research provide us with a great starting point, but there may be many others waiting to be identified.
As George Franki notes in Their Name Liveth for Evermore: Mosman’s Dead in the Great War 1914-1918 a search for ‘Mosman’ in The AIF Project database at ADFA returns more than 1500 names . This includes people who provided a Mosman address for themselves or their next-of-kin.
Mapping Our Anzacs lists 80 people who were born or enlisted in Mosman . In the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database a search for ‘Mosman’ and First World War returns 144 names. This seems to be based on the address of the next-of-kin and includes people who served in the armed forces of other Commonwealth countries. For example G Hurst , the son of Joseph Hurst of Mosman, was a private in the Royal Fusiliers.
But ‘Doing our bit’ is not just about finding names, it’s about linking resources. Once we’ve identified servicepeople related to Mosman we want to build up a network of documents and data. Where do we start? As a first step we’ll want to search the following databases saving the urls of any matching records:
- WWI service records (National Archives of Australia) — via Namesearch or Mapping our Anzacs
- Roll of Honour (Australian War Memorial)
- Nominal Roll (Australian War Memorial)
- Embarkation Roll (Australian War Memorial)
- Red Cross Wounded and Missing files (Australian War Memorial)
- Commonwealth War Graves database
Are there other datasets we should be searching? What sorts of biographical information should we be trying to capture? Where else should we look for names? Come along to the Build-a-thon to start the matching!