A Confession...

We get a lot of visitors each year who are researching family members who were stationed in Orkney during war time. Although we hold some interesting books and documents which illustrate the general themes and feelings of the time, we do not hold service records or specific information about military or naval personnel.

The place to go for that kind of thing is the National Archives at Kew, Surrey. This page shows the sort of information that is available there.

I thought that it would be useful to point this out as quite a lot of visitors are disappointed by the lack of personal information that we hold on the many men and women who spent their wars on the islands.

We do make up for the lack of cold, hard fact with lots of pictures of jolly parties though, look:

Stanger Head, Flotta, 1st World War.

Hatston Camp, Christmas 1947

Navy Camp at Yesnaby, 1943.

UPDATE: We are working to correct this. Some years ago we started a database and gathered a group of volunteers together to compile it. They painstakingly trawled through our archive items and if they spotted any service personnel mentioned, they added the information to the database. So, we may not have troop movements or know exactly they were based in Orkney, but we may know if they won a boxing match, appeared in a photo or starred in a play. (Dusty, 2024)