Reading a Service Record

Supporting guides

• What Forms Make Up a Service Record?
  A service record is a bundle of forms: attestation or enrolment, postings, promotions, medical and disciplinary entries, and discharge or casualty papers, among others. Each form answers a different question, so read the bundle form by form, not as a single narrative.
• How Do I Put a Service Record in Date Order?
  Put a service record in date order by sorting every dated entry, including undated sheets placed by their neighbours, before writing any timeline. A timeline written from the bundle order will repeat the filing order's mistakes.
• How Do I Decode Service Record Abbreviations?
  Decode abbreviations from a period glossary and from the surrounding entries together, and leave any abbreviation untranslated rather than guessing. A guessed expansion will corrupt every later search built on it.
• What Do Crossings Out and Corrections Mean?
  Crossings out and corrections show the record being amended at the time, often when a posting or rank was corrected. Read the correction as evidence of a change, and note both the original and the corrected entry.
• How Do I Read Medical Entries?
  Medical entries record fitness, treatment and hospital admissions in brief form, and they use medical shorthand of the period. Read them for dates and places, and do not turn a brief entry into a diagnosis.
• How Do I Read Disciplinary Entries?
  Disciplinary entries record offences and punishments in formal terms, and they should be read in their period context. A disciplinary entry is one fact in a career, not a summary of a person's character.
• What Do Pay Entries Tell Me?
  Pay entries can confirm rank, trade and periods of service, because pay followed rank and mustering. They are supporting evidence for dates, not a substitute for posting entries.
• What Do Next of Kin Entries Show?
  Next of kin entries show the contact details recorded at enlistment or updated later, and they can help family research. They reflect the record's date, so a later address does not rewrite an earlier one.
• How Do I Handle Missing Sheets?
  Handle missing sheets by noting the gap, checking whether another record covers the same dates, and leaving the timeline open at that point. A timeline with an honest gap is more useful than one filled with a guess.
• Should I Transcribe a Service Record?
  Transcribe a service record in full, keeping original spellings and abbreviations alongside your expansions. A good transcription is the working copy you search from, while the original remains the authority.
• When the Record Contradicts the Family Story?
  When the record contradicts a family story, trust the dated record for dates and units, and treat the story as a clue about experience that the record does not capture. Both can be true in different ways, but only the record fixes the timeline.
• How Do I Write a Summary From a Service Record?
  Write a summary as a dated list of postings, ranks, trades and key events, with a source note for each line. A summary without source notes cannot be checked, and a timeline that cannot be checked will not survive contact with new records.