This is a brief guide to researching British government and military records of the Crimean War. Crimean War records are wide-ranging, sporadic and are kept in a variety of places. This guide will help you gain a general overview of the main sources of the information that exists, and where to find it. This guide is for people interested in the subject of the Crimean War as opposed to those interested in finding a specific person who fought in the conflict.
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What records can I see online?
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There are no significant collections of records on the subject of the Crimean War available online.
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What records can I find at The National Archives at Kew?
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War Office: commanders' dispatches (1854-56)
Browse Discovery, our cataloguea search tool with descriptions of tens of millions of documents from the UK central government, law courts, and other national bodies, for commanders' dispatches from Crimea during the war from WO 1/368 to WO 1/384. These are arranged chronologically.
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Foreign Office general correspondence: France, Russia and Ottoman Empire (1781-1905)
Browse our cataloguea search tool with descriptions of tens of millions of documents from the UK central government, law courts, and other national bodies for general correspondence relating to the French, Russian and Ottoman Empires before 1906 in FO 27, FO 65 and FO 78 respectively. You will need to use the registersRegister - a volume of regularly and formally recorded information and indexes in FO 605 to access these seriesa grouping of records held by The National Archives, based on common function or subject.
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To access these records you will either need to visit us, commission research (£there will be a charge) or, where you can identify a specific record referencea unique set of letters and numbers identifying a document in The National Archives, order a copy (£there will be a charge).
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What records can I find in other archives and organisations?
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Records held locally
Search the Access to Archives (A2A) and National Register of Archives (NRA) databases to find records held in local archives.
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What other resources will help me find information?
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Websites
Search Hansard for Parliamentary debates on the Crimean War.
Explore The National Archives' British Battles online exhibition on The Crimean War for an interactive history of the conflict.
Search The Times Archive and the Guardian and Observer Digital Archive to view articles (£There may be a charge for accessing this information. Searching indexes may be free.) about the Crimean War.
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Books
Read The Crimean War, British Grand Strategy Against Russia, 1853-1856 by Andrew D Lambert (Manchester University Press Manchester, 1991).
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Napoleonic Wars
Boer War
British Army soldiers up to 1913