Is your relative missing from the war memorial?

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.

 

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

 

Hi 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?