The Royal Air Force Museum has launched a new website allowing people to explore previously unseen Casualty Cards of members of the Royal Flying Corps who were killed or injured during the First World War.
Also publicly available is the Muster Roll for the RAF as drafted on April 1st 1918, when the world’s first independent air force was created with the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service.
The latest online resource is the culmination of a three-year digitisation project involving over 10,000 hours of work by staff at the RAF Museum in the UK.
More than 300,000 fragile records been electronically preserved. All are free to examine for anyone with access to the internet.
Karen Whitting, Director of Public Programmes for the RAF Museum, said: “As part of the Museum’s on-going mission to open up our archives to the public, we felt it was of paramount importance that, as the world unites to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War, our online visitors were able to read these fragile documents which previously would have only been accessible through supervised visits with our curators.
“Each of the records contained within this digital archive reveals the story of a member of the Royal Flying Corps who suffered injury, often making the ultimate sacrifice to protect their families and their country at a time of major global conflict – heroes such as Albert Ball and Mick Mannock whose names are central to the story of the First World War in the air.
The RAF Museum Storyvault archive can be found here.
The project forms part of wider plans to highlight the story of the 1914-18 air war. Permanent new exhibitions are being created at the RAF Museum’s sites in London and at Cosford in the West Midlands.
Source: RAF Museum
Images:©Trustees of the RAF Museum
Posted by: Peter Alhadeff, Centenary News