I am looking for an officer, NCO or common soldier (period before 1740)

There are no muster rolls (“Musterlisten”) of the Imperial regiments for the pre-1740 period, and very few of the extant registers of military parishes cover this early period. Information on common soldiers therefore is hard to come by.

Generals and officers can be traced in the registers and the scarce extant files of the Hofkriegsrat as well as in the “Alte Feldakten”. However, there are no personnel files or dossiers for generals and officers in this period.

Your research will largely need to focus on the registers of the Hofkriegsrat, the central military authority of the Habsburg Monarchy (until 1848).

Protocols and indices of the Hofkriegsrat up to 1768 are accessible online. For the period prior to c. 1750 the corresponding files have largely been destroyed. Consequently register entries will more often than not be your only source. It is very rare that common soldiers are mentioned at this level.

There is a valuable history of the branches and regiments of the Imperial, Imperial-Royal and Imperial and Royal (Austro-Hungarian) army from 1618 onwards by Alphons Freiherr von Wrede, Geschichte der k. u. k. Wehrmacht, 5 vols. (Vienna 1898–1905, incomplete). For a separate index of the regimental proprietors, regimental commanders and senior officers killed in combat see here (PDF, 317 KB).