How to navigate the new version of our website

Welcome to our new website. In this version of our website, we’ve added some additional functionality.

Understanding the records

Note: the records tables are best viewed on a desktop of laptop device.

For all record types (prisoners, camps, working parties, and medical facilities) we’ve added a number of structured data fields to standardise the records and enable us and you to use more sophisticated search and filtering features to make it easier to find individual records in our database and relationships between them.

There’s still a lot of work to do to complete this process but we hope you’ll find the new functionality useful.

The following structured fields have been added (fields in bold text are filterable on results/record search pages):

Prisoner records

Last/family name
First & other names
Nationality (often unpopulated as we don’t assume a prisoner was, for example, British simply because we know they were in the British Army)
Date of birth
Place of birth
Service number
POW number
Military unit
Camp (connects to the Camp record)
Working party (connects to a Working Party record)
Medical facility (connects to a Medical Facility record)
Rank when captured
Place of capture
Date of capture
Data sources (we try to maintain a record of where the information you can see has come from)
Related posts (connects the prisoner record with relevant items in the Collections)

Camp records

Camp type
Aliases/also known as (some camps went by different names/numbers throughout their history)
War-time place name (camps in locations under occupation or whose jurisdiction has changed since use may have had a more commonly known name while in use)
Contemporary name (how the location is general known now)
Location (coordinates – some approximate)
Working Party records under the jurisdiction of the camp
Related posts (connects the camp record with relevant items in the Collections)

Working Party records

Camp
Number (most working parties went by a number, rather than a name or location)
Location(s)
Related posts (connects the Working Party record with relevant items in the Collections)

Medical Facility records

Camp
Location(s)
Related posts (connects the Medical Facility record with relevant items in the Collections)

Searching the site and records

In addition to the filters on the results pages you can search within each record type from the home page. Search terms (that is, what you type in the input field) will be searched in every field and the main body content of each record.

You can also search everything (that is, all records and all items in the collections) by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the header and entering your search terms.

The collections

We’ve collected a lot of the information we had on the previous version of the site, and some new posts under a variety of categories. These are subject to change but whenever you are reading a post in any collection you can see others in the same collection by clicking the category name. These appear in a number fo places, most prominently under the title of each post.