I'm not looking for a specific time period, so any historical examples would suffice. I'm envisioning a scenario where any able-bodied men are conscripted for defense. If someone, say a farmer by trade, died in a battle, how would their family find out? Would they be notified directly, or perhaps only learn by asking around as other combatants returned? Would they simply wait until they gave up hope?
This response by u/welfontheshelf from a little while ago answers the question about the crusades specifically, and I'm pretty sure that can be extrapolated to most armies up until modern record keeping and notification protocols became commonplace. Of course, I'm sure there's a lot of other cool stuff people can talk about too; I just happened to remember this specific post.