Waterloo Lives: In Their Own Words
June 15, 2015 - Alwyn Collinson in News
Get involved in the National Army Museum’s project to capture previously hidden information about its unique Napoleonic archive.
The National Army Museum has recently digitised a selection of its Napoleonic archive. This collection covers a wide range of material on the Battle of Waterloo and the wider Napoleonic conflict. It includes the personal journals and correspondence of soldiers and officers involved in the campaigns, as well as regimental order books, lists of casualties, gallantry awards, and reconnaissance reports and maps.
The Museum has now launched a project on the Heritage Helpers crowdsourcing platform, inviting you to help discover and capture new information about these magnificent 200-year-old documents. Through the combined efforts of the Heritage Helpers community, the Museum hopes to be better able to share the experiences and stories of soldiers and civilians from the Napoleonic era.
You can contribute to this process by visiting Heritage Helpers and joining the Waterloo Lives: In Their Own Wordsproject.
As the Museum continues to learn more about these documents, it will be publishing them on its Online Collection. The items already available include:
- Letter sent home by Captain E Kelly, 1st Life Guards, describing the Battle of Waterloo, 1815
- Manuscript extract from Lady De Lancey’s narrative of the Waterloo Campaign, 1815
- Hand-drawn map of the Waterloo battlefield, 1815
- Notes on a conversation with Napoleon during his exile on St Helena, 1817
These activities are part of the National Army Museum’s Building for the Future project, which will see a radical transformation of the Museum’s offer. The project is being carried out thanks to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
