Welcome to a step-by-step guide that will help you begin your research journey to better understand the Indigenous soldier experience during the First World War. The five steps outlined below are designed to engage your research skills by encouraging you to ask questions and think critically about different types of primary sources, and to begin drawing connections between the historical past and our world today. Above all, this guide aims to assist you as you ask questions about different wartime experiences, including those of Indigenous soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

The steps outlined below, and their accompanying slides, use examples taken from the wartime service of four soldiers to demonstrate how to search for and understand different primary sources. Private Amos Murdock, Private David Bernard, Private Cornelius Barnhart, and Private James Bernard were all Indigenous Soldiers who served in various units during the First World War.

The first step demonstrates how to access a soldier’s service file. These files form the basis for your research and contain all the information you need to get started. From there, this guide moves to exploring the data entry portal you’ll use to record the information found in the soldier service file. The information you enter here will become part of a larger research database for academics, other students, and members of the public to use in the future.

Once you have a soldier service file and have entered information from the service file into the data portal, you can begin to expand your research to include other primary sources. Doing so will help give you a better understanding of your soldier's life prior to, during, and after their wartime experience. This includes looking for your soldier in census records, war diaries, courts martial or disciplinary records, cemetery records, and newspaper and archive collections. Not all of these historical sources will be relevant to your soldier. Deciding where to look for your soldier begins with the information found in their service file.

After you have searched for your soldier in all the relevant primary sources, you’ll begin to assemble a timeline of important events in the data entry portal. You can add as many events as you like, ranging from their place of birth to the various battles they fought in, to where they lived after returning to Canada.

The timeline combined with all the information from the service file and other primary sources will give the story of your soldier and their wartime experience. The final step is deciding how you want to share that research and honour the life of your soldier.

Once you have downloaded your soldier's service file and get comfortable with the documents inside, you can being saving the information found within the file.

First, you may find it easier to printout the list of fields so you can record them ahead of time using the following link.

In order to login to the data entry portal, you will need an access code that your teacher will provide.

Use Canada's census records to determine important information outside of military records.

The 'War Diaries' tracked the daily information about each military unit and can provide insight on the daily routines and special events.

Once you confirm that your soldier faced a Field General Courts Martial you can search for their record of offense.

If your soldier died during the war they may have a 'Circumstances of Death' card, which gives details about the nature of how he died.

The Canadian Virtual War Memorial is a registry to remember the sacrifices of those who gave their lives serving in uniform

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission can help to provide more information on those that died in service.

Using the data entry portal, you can build a timeline of the most significant dates and locations.