The First World War Canadian names in this commemoration were provided by Veterans Affairs Canada through its Virtual War Memorial at vac-acc.gc.ca and include deaths up to and including 1922. The deaths from 1919 to 1922 represent Canadians who died of wounds in the years after the war.

For more information about each of the 68,000 names, including their place of burial, you can explore the following sites: www.cwgc.org and www.war.museum.ca.

The Australian names data was received from the Australian War Memorial’s First World War Roll of Honour as of September 2019. The Memorial continues to amend the Roll of Honour — correcting errors on the database and bronze panels, including aliases; adding missing data to the database (such as cause of death or age at death, which was not provided at the time of compiling the Roll); and the addition of eligible individuals following approval by the Memorial’s Council. 

For more information, contact the Australian War Memorial Research Centre at GPO Box 345, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia  www.awm.gov.au.

Between 1914 and 1919 the administration of the Austrian military published 1,276 Lists of Losses (the Verlustlisten) containing the data of the fallen, wounded, missing-in-action and prisoners of war. Since some soldiers were wounded more than once, or wounded then taken prisoner and then died, many names are included several times in the different lists. The lists also include soldiers from all the political entities within the multi-nation Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The lists include all the ethnicities and the eleven regimental languages as recognized by Austro-Hungary. Accurately separating the names of the fallen according to which successor state of the former empire they originated from, is a difficult challenge. Together with several partner organisations, Familia Austria is systematically collecting these lists but it will likely be years before the work is complete. Therefore the Austrian names appearing in The World Remembers display are only those gathered from Austrian First World War monuments on which are carved the names of fallen Austrian soldiers.

Familia Austria 2022

The In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM) in Ieper, Belgium, has provided the data on Belgian deaths in the First World War. In its capacity as a City of Peace, Ieper partnered with the IFFM to compile the Names List, a database of First World War soldiers and civilians from all nations who lost their lives on Belgian soil. The IFFM updates and corrects the Names List database regularly.

For more information, contact flandersfields@ieper.be or go to database.namenlijst.be.

There is no precise estimate in Croatian historiography of the number of Croats who took part in the First World War. Some estimates state that almost 700,000 Croats from the present-day area of Croatia (including Croats from other parts of the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen) were mobilised. From the population of the Triune Kingdom, 17.8 percent were mobilised, with 16.2 percent mobilised in Dalmatia and Istria. Whereas in the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, 15.6 percent was mobilised.

The exact number of Croatian dead has not been determined. There were many challenges, including the problem of those who were listed as missing in the casualty lists (meaning, not officially declared dead) yet for whom there was also no confirmation from the Red Cross that they had been taken prisoner. Of those who fell into Russian captivity, all traces have been lost.

The military registers of fallen soldiers were kept by military priests or, in case of their absence, by unit commanders. The lists were forwarded to the Apostolic Military Pastoral Care in Vienna. However, the lists of killed/deceased soldiers in the registry books are not complete, since registration of the dead required the confirmation of a doctor, a priest, or two comrades-in-arms, which was not always possible.

With the increase in the number of Croatian soldiers killed on the battlefields, especially during the twelve battles on the Soča River in the Italian battle area and also during the Brusilov offensive, construction began of monuments to the fallen. The Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb ordered the construction of military cemeteries.

The Croatian names included in The World Remembers exhibit are from the HR-HDA-1448. Registry books collection, and the fallen from two regiments of soldiers recruited from the Zagreb district - 53rd K.u.k Infantry Regiment and 25th Home Guard Infantry Regiment.

Sources For the Database of WWI Soldiers Killed or Missing in Action Central Military Archives – Prague

Primary registering of soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army was at the level of their basic units — normally regiments — by their replacement components. It was done by the Land Register (Grundbuch) that kept entries of soldiers and their service careers in Land Register folios (Grundbuchsblatt). This system was adopted by the new Czechoslovak Republic’s army and so after 1918 registering remained through the regiments.

Another pre-war register was that of births and deaths. Registries of units and chaplaincy administrations of garrisons, territorial commands and hospitals, recorded major milestones in a soldier’s life on active duty — marriages, births of descendants, deaths. While in service, these registers for military personnel substituted for civilian registries.

At the outset of the First World War before the Austro-Hungarian army began to take enormous casualties, a system of recording combat losses had been put into practice — losses that included killed in action (KIA), captivity, injury, disease and missing in action. Small combat units assembled these records, then passed the information up the chain of command to a central registry at the Reich Ministry of War. The main registry developed the Casualty Lists (Verlustliste) and also communicated with international organizations such as the Red Cross. But because these central registries remained incomplete during the war, the information on the fate of many soldiers is missing.

The end of the war presented an opportunity for a comprehensive perspective on the scope of the conflict and the disintegration of social orders and organisations. In Central Europe, this included the collapse of the state authorities in Austria and Hungary. Although the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not as dramatic as other empires, the army of the new Czechoslovak Republic still faced a situation that required a settlement with the legacy of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In assembling the Czechoslovak records from the Austro-Hungarian records, we had to deal with incomplete registers as a result of combat actions, loss of records or arbitrariness of conduct of specific soldiers. Our challenges were dealing with the size of the losses and our need to reflect and register them.

For the internal needs of the Czechoslovak Ministry of National Defence, a card index of KIA soldiers in the First World War began to be developed, which now is included in the CMA-VUA archives as the ‘green’ card index. This index forms the basis of the database of soldiers killed, developed by CMA-VUA.

The ‘green’ card index was based on activities of individual military units, and therefore used the available sources from those units. However it was practically impossible to reconstruct all those sources, but available death registers played an important role. Many index cards include references to the register records, although for crosschecking purposes, it is not always possible to look up the entry in the records of the given unit. Besides registries, entries in primary registries of losses of the Austro-Hungarian Army also served as an important source of card index data.

One category in the index are soldiers regarded as missing even after the end of the war — men who had never been proved to be dead, in captivity, or alive. After the war, such missing soldiers were officially declared dead ‘in absentia’ in order to legally settle the personal, family or property affairs of the survivors. This declaration of death was performed by civilian courts and relevant military units, whereupon the ‘dead’ soldier’s name was entered into their primary register, into registry records and was also included in the card index of those killed. However the information value of such a declaration is not usually high and so the card index entry is restricted to identifying the battlefield from which the soldier went missing and the year in which he was declared dead in absentia.

These are the basic resources informing the ‘green’ card index. The index also includes additional but relatively scarce sources, such as reports by the Red Cross and the like. It is interesting that this card index bears little relation to the entries in the Casualty Lists (Verlustliste), nor was it resourced from them, nor does it include references to them, and yet individuals appear in both documents. It also contains no apparent relation to the units’ primary registries. But it can be assumed that because those who developed the card index may have kept the units’ primary registries available, an internal connection is likely.

To complete the picture, by the end of the 1930s, a second card index of KIA persons, the ‘white’ card index, was developed upon the requirement of the Ministry of National Defence of the Czechoslovak Republic. The ‘white’ card index essentially only utilized the registry records as its source. Given that fact, it is poorer in quantity, yet contains more complete records in terms of quality of information. For the most part, the information in the ‘green’ and ‘white’ card indexes overlaps and therefore the ‘white’ card index was not included in the database of KIA persons.

Central Military Archives – Military Historical Archive, Prague

For this commemoration France’s Ministry of Defense has directed us to the Mémoire des Hommes database that holds over 1.4 million names of French military personnel who lost their lives in the First World War. The data also includes names of soldiers from France’s colonial armies.

For more information go to www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr

or use the link,

https://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/fr/arkotheque/navigation_facette/inde
x.php?f=opendata

Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK) has provided The World Remembers with the names of more than 825,000 German soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War. There are hundreds of thousands of names missing from these data files. The estimated number of German military deaths is more than 1.7 million. A primary reason for the missing files is the loss of German archives as a result of Allied bombing in the 1939–1945 war. As VDK continues to find missing names of the dead, The World Remembers will include them in the display.

For more information on the names of the German war dead, go to www.volksbund.de. Local and regional archives in Germany may also assist you in your search for a name that does not appear here.

When searching for a Hungarian name in The World Remembers display, in the Date of Death search field please enter 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917 or 1918 until you receive a result. We are in the process of obtaining a date of death for each Hungarian soldier from the Military History Institute and Museum in Budapest and until such time as we receive this information, entering different years will assist your search. Please see below, the description of the work the Military History Institute and Museum undertook over the past eight years to assemble the names list.

The Sacrifice of the Hungarian Soldiers in the Great War

With the centenary of the 1914-1918 war, there was increasing interest in the first global conflict, whose history was becoming forgotten. The memories of the fallen, captured or wounded were mainly preserved through family histories. It is understandable that today people want to know more about the fate of their relatives. However, there was no freely queryable database available — so far. Although some attempts were made to collect the First World War losses of Hungary, an overall authentic summary has not been made.

It must be noted that after 100 years this Hungarian database can never be complete, as not all historical sources are still available. We must also be aware that the ‘loss records’ of the military forces of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy—due to various reasons—were not accurate even at the end of 1914, not to mention at the period of the military collapse in November 1918, when the records   be extremely incomplete.

The Ministry of Defence Military History Institute and Museum (MHIM) filled this gap with a project that can serve as a European model and of which we can be proud. Because of significant public and professional demand, in 2012 the MHIM started to process the military loss data of soldiers of Hungarian nationality into a queryable database, with special support from the Ministry of Defence. The Sacrifice of the Hungarian Soldiers is the resulting database of the killed, wounded and captured soldiers.

The Creation of the Database

With the support of the First World War Centenary Memorial Committee and the agreement of the (then) strategic partners—the MHIM, the MoD War Grave Care organisations prior to 2016 and the Hungarian National Archives—the MHIM was tasked in 2015 with coordinating the discovery, organization and publication of the data of the losses from Hungarian defence forces between 1914 and 1918, based on scientific source research. Thanks to this agreement and the regular support of the Centenary Memorial Committee, the processing was extended to other loss documents and the project was significantly accelerated.

The database focuses on soldiers with Hungarian nationality. It selects those who were drafted into the army from places within the former Kingdom of Hungary. In these cases, Hungary (Ungarn) was noted in their records. The available sources did not contain information that referred to ‘nationality,’ and so after these many years we could only rely on the place of settlement included in the historical records. Therefore, the selection of names for the database is based only on geographical location.

Besides those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their homeland, we thought it important to also include those who had been wounded or captured, for they, too, had made serious sacrifices.

The processing of data was done by teleworking, and the material received was subjected to two control phases. Data was first recorded in its original language of German, without any change or translation. The data was received monthly in the format of data collection tables and then submitted to content and format control. This included the uniform translation of German expressions, place names and so on. The categories of recorded data were:

• name
• rank
• troop (regiment, independent battalion)
• subunit (typically a company)
• country
• county
• place of birth
• year of birth
• type of loss case (killed in action, wounded, prisoner of war)
• time of loss
• reason of the loss (if known)
• place of the loss (if known)
• place of burial (if known)
• indication of source(s)

As a result of the digitalisation and processing work that lasted for more than eight years, there is data for more than 1,500,000 soldiers with Hungarian nationality, of which over 703,000 are cases of death, 528,000 are cases of injury and 341,000 are cases of capture. Due to the records systems of the period, in the case of a fallen soldier, their name might be repeatedly found in the database. Besides the loss records, there could be also regimental death certificates, medical institute death certificates or the cemetery cadastral documents relating to a war grave that may also contain the name of the queried person.

Types of Sources

The compiling of the database and processing work basically relied on six sources:

• list of losses officially published by the Imperial and Royal War Ministry
• death certificates in the Military History Archives of the MoD Military History Institute and Museum
• death certificates in the Austrian War Archives in Vienna (Kriegsarchiv)
• death certificates in the Slovakian War History Archives in Bratislava
• cemetery cadastral documents relating to war graves in the Austrian War Archives in Vienna
• civilian death certificates relating to death events of the First World War in the county member organisations of the National Archives of Hungary

List of Losses

Personal losses of the war involving extreme carnage are  in printed form in the Verlustliste (list of losses), in numbered booklets published weekly, and sometimes daily, by the Imperial and Royal War Ministry in Vienna. The necessity of processing is justified since no index was prepared for the more than 700 booklets, which made our queries difficult, or practically impossible, without certain other information. Families requesting queries mostly would not know the time or cause of death of their relatives.

Death Certificates

Nearly 400 boxes of First World War death certificates are preserved in the Military History Archives. The certificates are organised by troops. Due to the collection’s lack of an index, queries were almost impossible. Therefore, processing and organising the certificates into a database was necessary. In 2016 we completed the digitalization of 211 boxes of death certificates, during which nearly 60,000 photos were taken.

The work was continued in 2017 with the digitalization of death certificates with a Hungarian connection in the War Archives in Vienna and in the War History Archives in Bratislava. A total of 347 certificates were digitalised with the help of foreign partner institutes, totalling a 58,000-page volume. We extend our gratitude to our foreign partners, the War Archives of the Austrian State Archives and the War History Archives of the Slovakian Military History Institute, for their essential assistance.

Cemetery Cadastral Documents

Only 351 boxes of First World War cemetery cadastral documents survived in the War Archives in Vienna. The documents are sorted by countries and according to the geographical names.

Civilian Death Certificates

To identify the most World War I dead, our search included the exploration of civil administration documents as well as military, in order to create the most complete list possible of losses. The twenty county member institutes of the National Archives of Hungary collected data on the war dead, as well as other relevant information from civilian death certificates in their custody from between 1914 to 1980 and from any settlement records that could be found within the present borders. Approximately eight million family record entries were explored during the data collection.

Conclusion

No other loss database created in the past 100 years presents such a clear picture of the loss of Hungarian soldiers in the Great War. The research and database creation program lasted eight years and is now complete. It was the highlighted program of the First World War Cemetery Memorial Committee for many years. We are proud that this ambitious undertaking was initiated and mainly coordinated by the MHIM, with the sustaining support of the Ministry of Defence, as well as the First World War Centenary Memorial Committee, in cooperation with the National Archives of Hungary and the Budapest City Archives.

The entire database is unprecedented and considered as basic scientific research with significance in the Carpathian Basin.

Ministry of Defence Military History Institute and Museum 2020

Since Ireland did not achieve independence from Britain until 1922, the names of Irish soldiers as belonging to an independent Irish nation are not displayed here. Yet when the First World War broke out in 1914, Irishmen, like thousands of others living at that time in the then British Empire, enlisted for military service. From across the island of Ireland, approximately 200,000 are estimated to have enlisted over the course of the war, although the total figure of Irish-born personnel who served is likely higher due to the numbers who would have enlisted from outside of Ireland in Britain, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. It is currently estimated that at least 35,000 Irish personnel never returned home, although research is ongoing. The In Flanders Fields Museum Names List project provides a searchable online database of soldiers and civilians, including from Ireland, who were killed on Belgian soil. For the Names List project, go to imr.inflandersfields.be/search.html.

More information on Irish involvement in the First World War can be found at: https://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/ArmisticeDay/ArmisticeDay/index.html

The Italian names appearing in this display were primarily provided from a digital database built by ISTORECO - Reggio Emilia, an Italian historical organization, using as a source the twenty-eight volumes of Italy’s National Roll of Honour, first published by the Italian Ministry of War in 1926.   

Additional names were also contributed by Museo Civico del Risorgimento in Bologna and Museo Emotivo della Grande Guerra.

For more information contact redazione@albimemoria-istoreco.re.it,  museorisorgimento@commune.bologna.it or info@museoemotivo.eu

Japanese names are yet to be included in this exhibit. Discussions are ongoing for obtaining the names of the estimated 750 Japanese sailors and soldiers who lost their lives in the First World War.

The names of the more than 700 servicemen and women born in Malta who lost their lives in the First World War were obtained through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. We are grateful for the CWGC’s data contributions to The World Remembers project over the years. For more information please visit cwgc.org.

The more than 18,000 names of New Zealanders who lost their lives in the First World War were provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the New Zealand Roll of Honour.

For more information about the names, go to cwgc.org or aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph.

During the First World War, present-day Poland did not yet exist as an independent nation. The territory was divided into three partitions under the control of the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Republic of Germany. The Polish names presented in this project will not include those who lost their lives fighting in the armies of Russia, Austro-Hungary or Germany. The archival work of locating and extracting those names has yet to be undertaken.

The names that appear here were provided by Poland’s Military History Bureau in Warsaw and have been assembled from a number of sources, among them the Polish Legion, the Polish Corps and the Polish Blue Army.

For more information, contact p.baranowska@ron.mil.pl at the Military History Bureau in Warsaw. 

The names of the more than 6,000 Portuguese military personnel who lost in the First World War were obtained from Liga dos Combatentes Portugueses in Lisbon. It is estimated that thousands more Portuguese soldiers, sailors, colonial troops and army medical personnel also lost their lives. For more information please contact biblioteca@ligacombatentes.org

The Romanian data was provided by the National Office For The Memory of The Heroes through the Diplomatic Archives of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There are multiple documents, some published soon after the war and some more recently. The “List of War Heroes” published in 1919 contains 12,594 names but provides no dates of death for those soldiers. On the centenary of the First World War - referred to by Romania as the War of Reformation - InfoCons in Bucharest produced a publication with more than 60,000 names of lost Romanian soldiers. The World Remembers has begun to combine the data in that book with other sources, each source with varying degrees of information on each soldier. It will take time before a more comprehensive database is assembled that has complete information on each soldier. Nevertheless, in this display The World Remembers has included the first thousands of the tens of thousands of Romanians lost in the 1914-1918 war.

The data provided by the Institute of Military History will include the names of soldiers from the Slovak territory who lost their lives while serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army (KUK). The names were extracted from the Casualty Lists (Verlustliste). These records of the KUK were not entirely complete because of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the war.

At the time of this exhibit’s launch at the Canadian War Museum, the Institute of Military History in Bratislava is working towards digitally publishing its records of more than 150,000 Slovak names. The names will be added to this commemoration after the list has been received by The World Remembers. Please see below the description of the Institute of Military History’s work to assemble the list.

For more information, please contact vhu@vhu.sk or

The Institute of Military History
Krajná 27
821 04 Bratislava
Slovak Republic

The Slovenian names data was provided by the collaborators of the project Collection of Data on World War I Military Casualties in Slovenia. The database is not yet complete. The estimated number of fallen soldiers from the Slovenian territory is between 30,000 and 35,000. For more information, please contact the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana at inz@inz.si.

https://zv1.sistory.si/

The South African names data was provided by the South African National Defence Force. For more information, please contact:

South African National Defence Force
Documentation Centre
20 Visagie St, Pretoria Central, Pretoria, 0002 South Africa
Tel: 012 670 8127 (ask for reading room and enquiries)
Email: sandfdoc@mweb.co.za
www.dod.mil.za

The names of soldiers from the Ottoman Empire who lost their lives in the First World War were provided by the Turkish Ministry of National Defence in coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Losses from the Ottoman Empire were significantly higher than the number of names presented here. The World Remembers continues to seek sources for the additional names.

During the First World War, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The Ukrainian names displayed by The World Remembers will not include those who lost their lives fighting in the armies of either Russia or Austro-Hungary. The archival work to locate these names has yet to be undertaken.

The Ukrainian names that appear here were provided by the Ukrainian National Military History Museum in Kyiv and have been assembled from a number of sources connected with Ukraine’s struggle for independence in 1917 and 1918.

The names of the 258,204 soldiers from the British Forces killed in 1918 were provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Bear in mind that many men from Ireland, Canada, Australia and other nations also served in the British forces. Their military records are therefore in Britain and their names will appear in the UK names display.  For more information about each of the 258,204 names, including their place of burial, go to www.cwgc.org.

For more information on the UK data click here to be taken to the full UK Data Considerations page. 

The US names data has been provided by the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri which is consolidating WWI fatalities databases from a number of state archives and other sources. With no comprehensive national World War I database yet in existence, the work of the Museum and Memorial is an effort to create the first complete American database of all US servicemen and women who were killed or died in WWI. For more information contact research@theworldwar.org. 

The First World War names data from pre-Partition India was provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Of the various colonies in the French, German and British empires, undivided India (comprising present-day’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) contributed the highest number of men. The total number of Indian ranks recruited up to December 31, 1919, was 877,068 combatants and 563,369 non-combatants, for a total of 1,440,437. Between August 1914 and December 1919, India had sent overseas for purposes of war 622,224 soldiers and 474,789 non-combatants, pressed into one of the seven expeditionary forces: Indian Expeditionary Force (IEF) A to Europe, IEFs B and C to East Africa, D to Mesopotamia, E and F to Egypt or G to Gallipoli. 

For more information, go to www.cwgc.org.

The names of those who lost their lives in the Chinese Labour Corps while under British command have been provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Those who died while serving with French forces were obtained from the Mémoire des hommes database. We are unable, at this time, to verify the completeness of our list of names for the Chinese Labour Corps.

For more information, please contact: www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr or www.cwgc.org.

We acknowledge that the nations participating in this commemoration do not represent all First World War participants. It is the intention of The World Remembers to include all countries caught up in the 1914–1918 war. Those not yet participating have been contacted either through their 1914–1918 Centenary Commissions or through their representatives in Ottawa. We look forward to continuing our discussions with them.

Some nations not yet participating were once colonies of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium or Portugal. We understand that the names of their war dead are contained in the archives of the former colonial powers. Yet at present we believe this data would be difficult to extract with any reasonable accuracy. However, should any of these nations wish to join The World Remembers commemoration, we encourage them to contact us at theworldremembers@gmail.com. We are eager for a discussion.