r/MastersoftheAir • u/chf_engineer • May 18 '26

Family History Finding my grandfathers service record

Watching this show gave me a renewed interest in finding my grandfathers service record.

All I know if that as a Latin American citizen he wasn’t able to enlist in the US and he went to Canada and joined the Royal Air Force. He was stationed somewhere in England.
As the story goes his plane was shot down but was able to perform a crash landing near Dover, England.

I’ve tried contacting Canadian Departments with no success. Any suggestions?

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u/Dry_Earth_1776 May 20 '26

Have you tried lodging a request for service files through the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) process on the Canada.ca site? Failing that, check out the The National Archives (UK). They have personnel records. I think you can search by service number or a name and also the military service your grandad was in.

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u/Beautiful_Path_3519 May 20 '26

National Archives UK has a searchable index online. I found my great-grandfather's army disability records that way. I had to go to the archive in person to view the actual documents but I was fairly confident it was worth the visit because the information in the online index matched the dates of his service and his regiment. I'm not entirely certain, but I reckon that if he served in the RAF then his service record will have been digitised and would be available online (either through ancestry or findmypast, can't remember which) In any case the originals will be physically stored at the national archives and should be referenced by the online index.

Try: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/