Talk Radio's Home Schooling
On 12 June 2020 during Britain's Coronavirus lockdown, I was asked to contribute to Talk Radio's 'Home-Schooling' segment.
The new RGASPI website
RGASPI have recently updated their website, so this new post explains how to access the records of the British and Irish volunteers (the old blogpost can still be found here). As before, though the documents themselves are in the languages of the various national groups (English, Spanish, French, German etc.), the website itself is in Cyrillic. Unless you read Russian, I’d recommend accessing the site using Google Chrome, which can automatically translate webpages. The main page for accessing the six sections of the RGASPI files can be found here.
N.B. For those of you returning to this blogpost, I have made each image an active link, so you can go directly to the respective page.
As you can see there are six ‘children’ (main sub-sections of the site), accessed by clicking on the link ‘go to the next level’, which will take you to the next page.
The individual files of volunteers are held in Inventory 6. Lists, personal files of soldiers and commanders of inter-brigades. Follow the link, then click on ‘Go to the next level’ on the following page and you will be presented with the first page of cases (there are 1618 in total).
The files are divided up by nationality, then alphabetically. The first of ‘English’ files is number 100 (Aa-Ai) and the last is 218 (Y-Z).
Other national groups in the Fifteenth International Brigade include: Australians & New Zealanders beginning from file 67, Irish from 439, Canadians from 534 and Americans from 845 (though the first personnel file, Aa-Ai, is not until 855).
If you want to explore further, the archivists in the Tamiment Library in New York have put together an extremely useful guide to all the RGASPI files, which can be found here.
I hope you find this guide useful. Please let me know if you have any suggestions, criticisms etc.
