Searching for names on the Canadian Great War Project

There are three main search pages that can be used with the Canadian Great War Project.

Soldier Search by Regimental Number or Name

If you are looking for a specific name, or if you know the regimental number for the person, this is the best search page to use. This search page allows for options such as using ‘soundex’ on the last name, as some names were misspelled during the Attestation process in the Great War. You can also use options such as “Starts with” or “Ends With”. You can use this to track down individuals where the regimental number might have numbers transposed. As an example, you can enter a regimental number that starts with ‘18’ and has a last name of ‘Smith’.
This search makes it easy to track down individuals.

General Soldier Search

This search will look for words that appear anywhere in the record that has been entered. It is useful for finding all names that include a reference to a specific location. Entering ‘Stettler’, for example, will return all entries that contain Stettler, which could include the place of birth, next of kin address, place of enlistment, address at enlistment or address at enlistment.

There are a number of other options, which include finding men who died on a specific day, or whose date of birth falls inside a specific date range. Note that the dates can be misleading; While most of the men that died have their date of death recorded, many records exist in the database without a date of birth.

This criteria needs to be considered when using the search.

Search Soldiers and Diaries

In addition to the 116,254 soldier entries, there are 14,357 pages of War Diaries that have been transcribed. This search will find occurrences of words in both the soldier entries and war diaries. For example, entering "Vimy Ridge Smith" will find all records that have all three of these words.

Search Hints

Keep your searches broad. If you are using either the General Soldier Search, or the Search Soldiers and Diaries, you should make your initial search as broad as possible. For example, entering “John Smith Eastern Ontario Regiment”, will not find many results. “John Smith Ottawa” will find quite a few more. “John Smith” will find the most entries. There are numerous reasons for this. First, not all entries have the same degree of information entered. Second, the information entered may have been ‘normalized’. For example, the “Eastern Ontario Regiment” went to Europe as the 2nd Battalion, so a search for “John Smith 2nd Battalion” will have more success than looking for “Eastern Ontario Regiment”.

Avoid common terms. Searching for "Vimy" will return the names of all of 11,285 men who have no known graves and are commemorated on the Vimy Memorial. Entering "Vimy Ridge Smith" would return fewer records, but may also include men who were tin smiths, or black smiths.

Remember, i f you are looking for a specific name, use the Soldier Search by Regimental Number or Name page.

What if you can’t find the name you are looking for?

This is likely one of two things. Possibly, the search criteria that was entered was too specific. Make it less specific and see if the name comes up. A more likely case is that the name has not yet been entered into the database. So far we have entered around 15% of the names of men and women that served. Entering information into the database is an all volunteer effort, and it will take some time complete. We can always use help, so anyone that is interested in helping, please let me know, or see the information on this page.

If you think of other tips that would be good to add, please send marc an eMail and let him know.

Back