Not only have the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) released on-line many of their First World War period records covering prisoners of war, but also the Royal Air Force Museum have digitised their collection of 'casualty cards' (and related records) for the same conflict. Here is an example of how these two sets of records can work together. The release of these records is an exciting development, making it much easier to research individual servicemen - in this context, particularly prisoners of war and internees - from the comfort of your own home. For this example I am using the case of Lieutenant William Reid of the Royal Flying Corps, who was the first victim of the German air ace Max Immelman.

I set up this website about two years ago, as a way of raising the profile of the subject of Switzerland during the First World War, publicising the information that I had on this topic, and encouraging others to share information they have. This has gone really well. See the blog posts on this site with information supplied by other people, such as on a painting made by British former prisoners of war interned in Switzerland, a series of photographs of German interned former prisoners of war, and  on the Swiss national donation medal. But there was very little easily available information out there (in English at least) on Switzerland and the First World War. With the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of that conflict, this has changed and below I look at some of the interesting stories on the web.