Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD’s) were formed in 1909 by the British Red Cross and the Order of St John at the request of the War Office. Both men and women provided humanitarian aid to naval and military forces at home and abroad during the war. They were trained in various roles, including nursing, transport duties, garment making, cookery, ambulance driving, and administrative work.
The “United Kingdom, Red Cross Volunteers During WWI, 1914-1918” collection is now available on Ancestry.com. It’s a resource for genealogists and family historians to delve into the lives of over 90,000 British Red Cross volunteers who served during the First World War.
The collection contains 244,156 records, handwritten on index cards, all in English. Each record may include the volunteer’s name, age at enrollment, address, county, date of enrollment, name of hospital, rank, date of discharge, honours, and a description of duties.
Registrars often added comments, personal in nature and often containing anecdotes or details about personalityon the backs of the records. Click on the arrow to the right of the image to browse the entire record.
See the original at https://vad.redcross.org.uk/.