Breakthrough!

Yesterday I was at the King's Regiment Family History Day at the Museum of Liverpool, I had a great day, met some relatives of men from my memorial and helped a few people with their enquiries (but wasn't very good at getting contact details so please do get in touch if I gave you my card!)

The breakthrough came about thanks to the amazing work done by Kathy D, she has spent I don't know how many hours indexing wounded and casualty lists and digging up resources from all over the place to collate a huge amount of information in her databases. Without her hard work and the amazing database she is creating, the following connection couldn't have been made...

The only name on my memorial that I had drawn a complete blank with was Thomas Girvin. There just wasn't anyone of that name in the area, Kathy had a look in her database and found Thomas Lindburg who died of wounds, and his mother was listed as Girvin. Could it be my man? Kathy searched about a bit more for me and found that in the 1911 census Thomas Lindburg lived practically over the road from St James Church with his mother Harriet Girvin and her husband. I'm still searching about to figure out the strange dynamics of this family but I am confident that this is the right soldier. The 1911 census claims Harriet was married the year after Thomas was born, so it is conceivable that he was known as Thomas Girvin but his family used his official name on forms and he used it to enlist in the army.

There is a link to Kathy's website "Liverpool Soldiers" on the Links and Resources page.

Centenary Partnership Programme

The St James War Memorial Project is very pleased to announce that we have been accepted into the Imperial War Museum Centenary Partnership Programme -see the lovely logo on the left!

Now on facebook!

Visit our new page on Facebook - to keep this blog focused on the Memorial research project I will be using the Facebook page to share information about what is going on with the wider plans for the project and to make it easier for people to contact me with questions.
https://www.facebook.com/StJamesWarMemorialProject

Dates for your diary!

There are a few events coming up which I will be attending with information about the St James Memorial Project:

Saturday 7th September 10am-12noon St James Church, Upper Parliament Street.

St James is taking part in the Liverpool Open Heritage Month. Come along for the chance to look around this historic building (click here to go to my page about the history of the church) There will also be talks about:

• The architecture of the Church
• Discovering our history in the archive
• Restoring the stolen WW1 war memorial (Me!)
• Using the building for the community


Also,

Sat 28th September 10am - 4pm
King’s Regiment  Family History Day in the Museum of Liverpool 

I have a stand at the Family History Day where I will be displaying information about the St James Memorial Project and will have a database of the information I have researched. I will also be giving a talk about the project and how I have gone about researching these men.


Hope to see you there!

photographing churches

I've spent a few hours today visiting various churches in Liverpool and photographing their WW1 memorials.  I received a wonderfully warm welcome everywhere I went and many thanks are due to the various people who showed me around the churches and gave me lots of useful information about their memorials.

If you are interested in looking at WW1 plaques in Liverpool I would recommend visiting St Matthew and St James on Rose Lane, Mossley Hill http://www.mossleyhillchurch.org.uk/ and Christ Church on Linnet Lane http://www.christchurchtoxtethpark.org.uk Both of these wonderful buildings host a range of WW1 inscriptions (and interestingly, both suffered damage in WW2)

I took photographs of memorial to James Irvine, William Bolton, Hugh S Elliott and W H I Elliott which I will add to their posts on this blog.

I am also updating the posts to ensure they don't have any copyrighted material on (hence the disappearance of the Liverpool Museum Database photographs!) but the information contained in the photographs will be added to the posts, when I have time! While I do this, I am replacing census images with transcriptions as the images are very difficult to read.