How to Request War Records from the National Archives (Free)

If you're helping your teenager apply for a veteran-descendant scholarship - or you're the student doing the applying - you've probably hit the same question everyone hits early on: how do we actually prove the family's service history?

Programs like the Gallipoli Scholarship Fund and AVCAT's Long Tan Bursaries are built around descent from, or connection to, someone who served. Applications typically ask who your veteran was, where and when they served, and often what their service involved. The document that answers all of that in one place is the official service record - and here's the good news for families budgeting for uni: getting it costs nothing. The National Archives of Australia (NAA) holds more than 1.5 million First and Second World War service records, and the vast majority are digitised and viewable online, free, tonight, from your couch.

This guide walks you through the whole process, from "we only know his name" to reading the actual file. It works exactly the same whether the veteran in your family is a great-grandfather who landed at Gallipoli or a grandmother who served with the WAAAF.

Gather what you know first

You can technically search with nothing but a surname. But every extra detail you collect beforehand cuts down the number of wrong matches you'll wade through, so it's worth ten minutes with the family before you open a browser.

Useful details, roughly in order of value:

• Service number - the single best identifier there is. Don't panic if nobody knows it; the DVA Nominal Rolls (below) exist largely to solve this problem.
• Full name, including middle names - and any alternative spellings the family has used, because older records were often written down phonetically.
• Which conflict - even a vague "he was in the Second World War" narrows things considerably.
• Branch of service - Army, Navy (RAN) or Air Force (RAAF). Each branch's records sit in different series.
• Place of birth or enlistment - these frequently appear in NAA item titles and are the quickest way to separate two soldiers with the same name.

A name engraved on a medal, a photo with a unit patch, or a half-remembered story about New Guinea is still a workable starting point. You'll just lean harder on cross-referencing.

Who holds what: the three organisations you'll deal with

Australian military records aren't kept under one roof, and knowing which organisation holds which type of record saves a lot of dead-end searching.

National Archives of Australia

The NAA holds the individual personnel files - the personal dossier created for each person who served, containing their enlistment paperwork, service history, discharge documents and correspondence. It covers every branch and every conflict from Federation in 1901 onwards.

The record series you're most likely to meet:

Every WWI Army record in B2455 is digitised and free to view online - that includes the nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service, whose files sit in the same series as the infantrymen's. For the Second World War, the NAA had digitised roughly 1,058,000 service records as of 30 June 2024, which is 99% of the total. The last 1% can be requested at no charge.

Australian War Memorial

The AWM doesn't hold personal service records, but it holds the material that surrounds them: the WWI Embarkation Roll covering around 330,000 AIF personnel, the Roll of Honour for those who died in service, Army unit war diaries, Navy Reports of Proceedings, and the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau files for soldiers reported wounded or missing after July 1916. The AWM's People search lets you query several nominal rolls at once, which makes it a handy first stop when you don't yet have a service number.

Department of Veterans' Affairs

DVA publishes free online Nominal Rolls for four conflicts - World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the First Gulf War - at nominal-rolls.dva.gov.au. Each entry gives a snapshot of a veteran's service: number, rank, dates and unit. The WWII roll alone lists more than one million people. If your application form asks for a service number and nobody in the family knows it, this is usually the fastest way to find it. Once you have the number, jump straight to RecordSearch for the full file.

Step by step: finding the record on RecordSearch

RecordSearch is the NAA's collection database. It covers the entire federal government archive, not just defence records, so for individuals you'll use its purpose-built NameSearch function.

Step 1 - Open RecordSearch

Go to recordsearch.naa.gov.au. You don't need an account to search. Registering (name, contact details, password) becomes necessary only if you want to save searches, lodge access applications, or order records for delivery to a research centre.

Step 2 - Switch to NameSearch

Select the NameSearch tab. This is the search designed for finding records about people, and it's where nearly all family research starts.

Step 3 - Fill in the search fields

Put the surname in the Family Name field. Add the given name if you know it, keeping in mind that first names don't always appear on record titles and abbreviations are common.

Then pick the right option from the Category of records dropdown - this is what points the search at the correct series:

• "World War I Army personnel records" for AIF service (Series B2455)
• "World War II Army personnel records" for 2nd AIF and CMF (Series B883/B884)
• "Navy personnel records" for RAN service in any conflict
• "RAAF personnel records" for Air Force service

Got a service number? Enter it with no spaces (NX12345, not NX 12345). Only know part of it? Wildcards work - type the portion you know followed by an asterisk, like NX123*.

Step 4 - Work through the results

Each result shows the name, service number, series number and digitisation status. A digitised item icon (a small picture of pages) means you can open the record right now. Where several people share a name, the place of birth, place of enlistment or date range shown in the item title will usually tell you which one is yours.

Step 5 - View it, or request it

If the file is digitised, click "View digital copy" and you're in. You can page through the whole record and save individual pages by right-clicking the images - handy when a scholarship form wants supporting documents attached.

If it hasn't been digitised yet, select "Request copy" (on the right of the screen, above the item title) and the NAA will digitise it for you. Some series attract a fee, so check the NAA's copying charges page for current pricing before you order.

One status deserves special attention from scholarship families: "not yet examined" means the record hasn't been cleared for public access. You'll need to lodge an access application through RecordSearch asking for its release, and that process can take up to 90 business days. If you're working towards a closing date - and most veteran-descendant scholarships close months before the academic year - put that request in early. Our guide on how to apply for veteran-descendant scholarships covers timing the whole application, but the short version is: the record request should be one of the first things you do.

What's actually inside the file

Service records were created to run an army, not to tell your family's story - they're administrative files. That said, they're astonishingly rich once you know what each page is. A typical file contains:

• Attestation (enlistment) form - age, occupation, religion, marital status, next of kin, place of birth. Often the most genealogically valuable page in the whole dossier.
• Service and casualty form (Form B103) - the chronological spine of the record: units, postings, promotions, injuries, hospital admissions and disciplinary entries. It's also usually the hardest page to read, thanks to dense abbreviations and rushed handwriting.
• Discharge form - a summary of total service (not present in every file).
• Correspondence - letters from or about the service member, sometimes including employer references supporting their enlistment.
• Medical documents - brief medical classifications, occasionally fuller medical records.
• Identity photograph - around 40% of WWII Army and Air Force files include one. Most WWI Army and Navy files don't.

For a fuller tour of what these documents can tell you, see what is a service record and five things you can learn from a war record.

When the search doesn't go smoothly

Nothing comes up

Spelling is the usual culprit. Records were often transcribed by ear or shortened by busy clerks. Try the wildcard: the first three or four letters of an unusual surname plus an asterisk (Chin* catches China, Chinese and Chinnery). If NameSearch still returns nothing, run a Basic Search in RecordSearch with the full name as a keyword. And if you've genuinely exhausted the options, our post on what to do when your war records are damaged or missing picks up where this one leaves off.

Too many people with the same name

Extremely common - Australia wasn't short of men named John Smith in 1915. Sort them using place of birth, place of enlistment or service number, and use the DVA Nominal Rolls to confirm which entry matches your ancestor. Understanding how service numbers work helps a lot here, since the prefix alone can tell you which state someone enlisted in.

You've got the record but can't read it

Whether it's your grandfather's B883 file or your grandmother's AAMWS or AWAS record, the B103 form will be a wall of handwritten abbreviations. The Australian War Memorial publishes a glossary of common abbreviations that covers the frequent ones. When you need the entire record translated line by line, that's what we built our decode service for - more on that at the end.

The veteran served after WWII

Records for Korea, Vietnam and later conflicts are generally still with the Department of Defence rather than the NAA. Former serving members and next of kin can request them from Defence directly; everyone else lodges a "Defence service after World War II" enquiry through the NAA website. This matters for AVCAT sponsored scholarships in particular, where the qualifying veteran is often a Vietnam or more recent veteran.

Going past the personal file

The service record gives you the who, when and what. To understand where they went and what their unit was doing, add these sources once you have a unit name and dates:

• Unit war diaries (AWM) - the day-by-day operational record of Army units: movements, engagements, casualties. Available through the AWM research guides. See our guide to the difference between service records, unit diaries and nominal rolls.
• Embarkation Roll (AWM) - roughly 330,000 AIF personnel recorded as they left Australia in WWI, with age, occupation, address and next of kin at enlistment.
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission - 1.7 million graves and memorials across 150 countries, searchable at cwgc.org, for ancestors who died in service.
• Red Cross Wounded and Missing files (AWM) - about 32,000 files on soldiers reported wounded or missing after July 1916, often containing eyewitness accounts.
• DVA Nominal Rolls - WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the First Gulf War at nominal-rolls.dva.gov.au.

If you're tracing movements overseas, how to find where your ancestor served overseas walks through combining these sources, and we've got conflict-specific guides for WWI research and WWII research.

Quick reference: the key links

Where to next

You've got the record - now put it to work. Browse the free scholarship database to see every veteran-descendant scholarship currently open, from the Gallipoli Scholarship Fund to Legacy education support and the DVA education schemes, and match your family's service history against the eligibility rules.

And if the file itself reads like code - "TOS 2/1 Bn" isn't a typo, it means "Taken On Strength, 2nd/1st Battalion" - we can decode the whole thing for you. For $59 AUD we translate every abbreviation, notation and date on the record into plain language, map your ancestor's movements against the actual events of the war, and deliver a line-by-line spreadsheet plus a fully written narrative of their service. Upload the record at decodemydigger.com.au/upload and let their story do some of the talking in that scholarship application.