As many as 50,000 Irish men died serving in World War I.
As the world gathers to commemorate the end of World War I on Armistice Day, Irish people will remember that at least 200,000 young Irish men went to fight on European soil.
While there is much debate in the country over the status of the poppy, a symbol commonly used to commemorate those who died serving for the British army, there is no doubt that many Irish people today share familial ties to people who served or died in World War I.
The website A Street Near You has compiled data on those who died in the Great War, and can graphically represent those who died by the area they came from. This includes Ireland, so if you enter the name of your hometown you can quickly get details on people from your own locality who died fighting
The show is seeing so much traffic today that it’s struggling to handle it all.
According to the site-runner, these are the sources used to gather the data:
- Lives of the First World War – IWM’s unique project enabling everyone to share their information, stories and images to compile Life Stories “on nearly 8 million men and women who served in uniform and worked on the home front”.
- Commonwealth War Graves Commission – a unique online collection of the details of every serviceman or woman. Many of the locations here are extracted from what they call the ‘Additional information’ field, which typically contains text such as “Son of Samuel and Sarah Morley, of Derby; husband of F. M. Morley, of 113, Peel St., Ashbourne Rd., Derby.”. Note that this information was collected sevral years after the end of the war and it does not necessarily represent an address that the person had lived at.
- Imperial War Museums Collections – one of the richest collections of First World War objects and images, most notably in this context the Bond of Sacrifice Collection and the Women’s War Work Collection, together comprising images of nearly 20,000 individuals who served.
- War Memorial Register – another unique record from the Imperial War Museum, comprising records of over 78,000 memorials in the British Isles, together with listings of over one million names that appear on them.
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