A single line of smudgy black type reads "OWEN, Wilfred, lieutenant, Fifth Battalion Manchester Regiment." It is just one of more than 700,000 reminders of the carnage of the Great War kept in the dusty ledgers of a London archive. But now the entry of the poet Wilfred Owen in the official index of war dead, along with those of his comrades fallen in both world wars, has leapt from the corridors of the General Register Office (GRO) to cyberspace.
From today, amateur historians and genealogists will be able to search a website for scanned images of the original death records of more than a million British soldiers killed in conflicts from the Boer War to the Korean War.
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