©IWM Q32896  Inside a British Trench, Salonika, May 1917

The Photograph Archive can be a useful source for family historians. Around five million photographs by official military, professional and private photographers are held. Indexes of identified personalities exist for both the First and Second World War holdings. However, given the numbers involved, precise identifications of ordinary serving men or women are the exception rather than the rule. More commonly the images serve to provide a vital context to a relative's career or experience. Without doubt what can be especially helpful is to find photographs of ships that relatives served on, or photographs which offer a visual narrative of the war years.

The Film and Video Archive offers similar general material.

The bulk of the Sound Archive consists of retrospective interviews with service personnel and civilians, but there are also contemporary archive recordings and miscellaneous recordings from radio and television, and of lectures and poetry readings. The Sound Archive may well be the source of useful background information; for example a whole series of taped interviews were made with the participants in the Spanish Civil War, and if a relative had fought in this it would make fascinating listening.