Dear Soggies, You may be quite interested in an email I got from TNA after I challenged their statistics about WW1 Medal cards. [ I have removed the name to protect the guilty! <grin> ] Note that, of many million cards only 2,000 were sampled and if 2/3 of one percent had addresses, one wonders if others had other info on their reverse? By my count, if there were 5 million cards, as many as 33,000 cards with an address on the reverse were about to be lost The sample size is rather small to be stastistically significant. So, who knows, there might be over 100,000 addresses in limbo. So much for an Act that gives us access to non-classified records from 1st January 2005! One is lead to wonder what other family history useful information was shreaded by Ministries before 1/1/2005? Phil. >>>> Dear Mr Warn I have been asked to reply to your enquiry below. I am a former member of the MOD staff, I worked for 11 years on the Hayes site where these cards have been stored since the late 1980s, in a role in which I and other staff made regular use of the cards, quite often in the hope of finding an address on the back. In the course of that work, we formed a user's view of the likelihood of finding anything there and, had I been asked the question a year ago or ten years ago, I would have said that it is extremely rare to find an address on the back of a soldier's card. I might have guessed at one in a hundred or one in a thousand - in other words, in my considerable experience of delving into the cards, success was rare. I could not say how many thousands of cards I looked at over a period of years, but it would not have been inconsiderable and, as I say, the experience was not exclusively my own. A formal random sampling of 2,000 cards was carried out in March this year, to inform TNA whether the past users' "gut feeling" on this was correct. Soldiers' cards bearing addresses were found in 0.65% of the cards sampled. Yours sincerely <<<<