UK War Wills

During the First World War final handwritten wills were kept by U.K. troops and other Allied troops in their pocket service books and tucked into their uniforms. Now those original paper records that survived are preserved in 1,300 boxes inside a temperature-controlled warehouse run by data company Iron Mountain in Birmingham, UK. The last wishes, thoughts and concerns of more than 230,000 soldiers who died on the front line during World War I are now to be made available online. The wills, which are owned by Her Majesty's Court and Tribunal Service (HMCTS), are being digitised in time for next year's centenary of WWI. The huge online archive is also as part of a larger project to make all war wills publicly available, dating from the Boer War to the Falklands. BBC News was given access to the first batch to be made available online, and the full article can be read at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23861821