Researching a Relatives Military Medal Entitlements for Replica Medals

It is important to ensure that you know what medals your family member was entitled to for their military service. The wrong replica medals can cause embarrassment or worse if medals being worn were not relevant to the original recipient for their military service.

The good news is that we can find out the correct medal entitlements of your family member. This is not only important from a correct entitlement perspective, but it is also important because each medal tells a story of that persons military service. From the medals, we can establish the area region they served in and sometimes a time frame and also if they were distinguished with any bravery or gallantry awards or other special awards during their military service.

Typically, here in Australia we get research requests from the Boer War up to the Vietnam period, and occasionally after this point. What we need to find out a family members medal entitlement is

· Name

· Date of birth (if known)

· Hometown (where they were from or living at the time of their enlistment)

· Service number (if known)

Generally, once we have the basic information, we can start the research process. References such as the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia are our main sources. If this proves unfruitful we employ our professional researcher to dive into the archives to view the actual service records and provide a typed summary report of the persons service history and their medal entitlements. There is a small cost to engage the professional researcher, contact us for details 073871 0600.

Our professional researcher is also able to determine the medal entitlements for New Zealand and British military personal. Most of the time researching British records can be done from here in Australia however, our researcher goes to the UK each year to view the actual records for those that can’t be found here in Australia.

In 75% of cases we can ID a family members medal entitlement ourselves from the National Archives via their web site and there is no cost for this, but sometimes especially if the service records have not been uploaded, we need our professional researcher. Note that not all WW2 Australian service records have been uploaded for public viewing, it is a “work in Progress” with the archives.

So, let us know if you’d like some help identifying a family members service medal entitlement, we will be happy to help you.