Thanks to Sound Shore for the pointer to the new index from the Larchmont Historical Society. That group has taken the book Soldiers of the Great War (an photo book of many fallen US soldiers from WWI) and has scanned and indexed all the pages dealing with soldiers from New York State. This index is available at http://nyww1.larchmonthistory.org/.

The book that’s been digitized unfortunately does not have all the NY fallen soldiers from WWI listed. The site does note the limitations, the biggest one being that soldiers who did not have pictures available were not listed in the book. Still, the site has 76 pages of photographs of fallen soldiers from New York State. You can search it by soldier name or community name.

I did a search for smith and got 8 results. The search results page just shows you a thumbnail of the page; you don’t get full names. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the page, with pictures, and a transcription list of the soldiers on that page. The transcript shows the solider’s name, the New York town from which they came, and a code for their death or injury (killed in action, died of disease, died of wounds, died of accident, or wounded in action.)

The Larchmont historical society has made the images in this index available for free download, but you do have to do to a bit of extra work to get to them. When you find a page image you want via the search, note the page number. Then visit the image download page, find the page number you’re looking for, and click on it. You’ll get a jpg of the page that you can download via right-click.

Excellently done, Larchmont Historical Society — but I can’t help but wonder what happened to the rest of the book…