Is your relative missing from the war memorial?

[PaulC]

Something else that caught my eye on the latest newsletter as I am currently up to my neck in research for a local war memorial project...

As someone who reguarly follows posts on the Great War Forum, it seems that the issue of retroactively adding names to war memorials can be a rather emotive one for some. While many people don't have a problem with this, there are others who passionately believe that we shouldn't be attempting to "re-write" history by second-guessing decisions made by a local community almost a century ago. It's an interesting debate that seems to pop up every now and then.

 

[Britjan]

Welcome to our forum Paul ,
Have you been "remembering" and linking your project to the IWM Lives of the First World War website?

 

[PaulC]

Hi Britjan, I set up a community on LotFWW a while ago, but my contributions there have been a bit sporadic...

 

[Britjan]

I set up a community on LotFWW a while ago, but my contributions there have been a bit sporadic...

I know the feeling but I did notice the accompanying link to the Facebook page where there are some really good entries which could be pasted into your community. You would simply add them to the appropriate service person as a story with the poster's permission. Could you put me in touch with Richard Houghton at the Facebook site as I'd love to copy one of the children's drawings to my "uncle' Tom's page? I was just about the same age as the children when he would tell me stories about working with horses in WWI.

 

[peter]

second-guessing decisions

Are you suggesting they deliberately chose to omit certain soldiers who gave their lives for their country? That sounds outrageous if true.

 

[PaulC]

I know the feeling but I did notice the accompanying link to the Facebook page where there are some really good entries which could be pasted into your community. You would simply add them to the appropriate service person as a story with the poster's permission. Could you put me in touch with Richard Houghton at the Facebook site as I'd love to copy one of the children's drawings to my "uncle' Tom's page? I was just about the same age as the children when he would tell me stories about working with horses in WWI.

I know, it's just a question of finding time and I find the process of adding info a bit long-winded and cumbersome. It's on my to-do list though, I will go back to it at some point.

If you want to get in touch with Richard Houghton you're probably best doing so through the Lathom & Burscough Military Heritage Society website. He knows his stuff about war horses and the WW1 remount depot at Lathom.

 

[PaulC]

Are you suggesting they deliberately chose to omit certain soldiers who gave their lives for their country? That sounds outrageous if true.

I don't think it's that so much Peter. One side of the argument seems to be that, with the passage of time and lack of contemporary records, it generally can't be known what criteria a local community used when selecting names for a memorial, therefore it can't be said that any "missing" names are merely a case of oversight. For example, a family might have wished to commemorate their dead in some other way, or perhaps not at all, or there may have been other factors involved that have since been forgotten. Another side of it seems to be the opinion that war memorials are historic monuments and should be preserved the way they are.

These aren't opinions that I necessarily share, BTW. However I would hope that any permanent additions to a memorial are supported by thorough research, and I wouldn't ask for a name to be added if there was no personal connection, I think such things are best done at the request of the family or with wider community support.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Are you suggesting they deliberately chose to omit certain soldiers who gave their lives for their country? That sounds outrageous if true.

It could be that a young man was recorded on the memorial for the village he worked in rather than the village he was born and that workplace village was seen as the place he had the greatest connection with. eg: if he was a live in servant. His family might have wanted it that way.

Now consider in 2015 someone researching a village finds that the young lad aged 14 was on the 1911 census in that village, his birth village. Not knowing that he had subsequently moved with the family and worked for years in a different village, before being killed in 1918. If the family had lived for 7 years in a new village and kept on living there after his death it is understandable they would want the memorial where they and he had lived. They may not have wanted the memorial or thought it relevant to be in his birth village.

The 2015 researcher might be "outraged" that he is missing from the memorial in the village he was born in. However with no access to the 1921 census yet it means the researcher may not know the family moved in 1911 just after the census, there is incomplete research. Why then should the views of a researcher 100 years later, whether they are related or not, trump that of the family at the time? As PaulC says we lack reliable surviving records of why decisions to include or not were made.

 

[Prairie Girl]

I just have to weigh in with my two cents' worth on this topic. Even if we know the original criteria for war memorial selection, I don't think we should be condoning such revisionist history, not to mention the arrogance of assuming that the people who made the original list didn't know what they were doing. As an example, the family of one of my distant cousins moved to Montreal in about 1906, from a village where our ancestors had literally helped build the place in the 1780s. One of the sons of the Montreal family was lost as a member of the 1st Canadian Division. His name appears on the war memorial as a son of the ancestral village, even though his family had left Scotland more than 10 years before he died. As a naturalized Canadian, perhaps the revisionists would have us strike his name off the village's memorial?

 

[peter]

Clearly we can't always know whether someone was omitted deliberately, or accidentally, nor - in the case of deliberate omissions - what the reasoning was. I have always assumed that soldiers who died were commemorated in the communities that remembered them - where there were family members, or people who knew them from school or from church (or simply from the pub). The fact that someone moved away before the war wouldn't necessarily make their loss any the less.