Rosemary Collins finds out how a town in Suffolk created a virtual war memorial
YOUR PROJECT S
More than one million Britons died fighting in the First and Second World Wars. So it’s no wonder that many of us have people in our family tree who fell in the two conflicts, and most of our towns and villages have a memorial commemorating the casualties from the local area. But how much do we know about the names on those memorials?
In Lowestoft, Suffolk, local resident Joe Thompson came up with the idea for a virtual war memorial after being inspired by a similar project in the nearby town of Felixstowe. Joe had previously created the heritage website Lowestoft Old and Now, located at lowestoftoldandnow.org.
“With my background in IT and design I thought, ‘Let’s see’,” he says. “The first thing I needed to do was to get good data.” So he contacted the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which keeps an online record of the 1.7 million individuals commemorated on Commonwealth war memorials (cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead). He says that the CWGC staff were “extremely helpful” and sent him all of the records they had containing the word ‘Lowestoft’. Although this created some false positives, it was a good starting point.
Joe then teamed up with Rev Damon Rogers, the vicar of St Andrew’s Church on Roman Road. Using other records from the First World War, the pair identified more men who weren’t commemorated on the war memorials – for instance, some who grew up in the local workhouse.
With funding from Lowestoft Town Council, Joe launched the website Our Fallen featuring a searchable database of 2,025 men and women from the town who were killed in the world wars: ourfallen.lowestoftoldandnow.org/. The next step, Joe says, was turning to social media. He put out an appeal and got in contact with people whose family members were in the database, and they supplied stories and photographs of their relations.
“Although 20 years ago more old pictures would have still been available in family archives, there
