The Great War Archive
Welcome to The Great War Archive, a major project run by the University of Oxford. The aim of this site is to collect together material related to the First World War held by members of the public. This is your chance to contribute items you have, or stories your family have passed down, to help keep the memory alive of the sacrifices made during World War One. We will be collecting contributions via this website and through our various submission days (at libraries, museums etc) until the 30th June 2008 (please note that the deadline for submissions has been extended). The final collection will subsequently be made available free of charge via the Web on the 11th November 2008, the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.
A call to attics, bottom drawers and such...
Do you have memorabilia from the First World War? Do you have a story to tell about a relative who lived through this historic event? If you do and you are willing for other people to see and to use these for educational purposes (but not to make money out of them), then we would like you to send us digital copies of them for inclusion in the Archive.
The kinds of memorabilia in which we are interested include: Letters, diaries, photographs, drawings, postcards, recordings (film or sound), poems and souvenirs - in fact, memorabilia of any kind.
We are also very interested in collecting any stories of wartime experiences that have been handed down through your family.
How do I get started?
Over the next few screens you will be asked to give some basic information about yourself, and the item(s) you are submitting, and then to upload a file or files if appropriate (this might be a digital photograph of the item you have, for example).
Editor's pick
Signals dated 11th November 1918
Signals or "flimsies" (so called because of the very thin paper they were written on) were confidential reports sent by units or important individuals to one another during the war. By 1918 there was an enormous amount of "signal traffic" being generated from the rear to the front and vice versa.This image shows a signal reporting that "hostilities ceased at 11.00" on the 11th November 1918, the Armistice of World War One. The report was found amongst the papers of Frank Blackburn and brought into the submission day at Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library on 8th April by Mr John Blackburn.
