PRISONERS OF THE GREAT WAR

racking down an ancestor who became a prisoner of war (PoW) in World War I can be tricky. When the conflict started, neither side was well-prepared to accept PoWs and people who were captured early in the war even helped to make their own prison accommodation. Throughout the war, records of individuals detained by the enemy were often incomplete because of the sheer scale of the administrative task of documenting them. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that about 10 million people were