Back in September 2014, Luddenden Conservation Society launched a search for relatives of local men who died in or as a result of service in WW1. The community history project forms the Society’s commemoration of the centenary of the First World War in Luddenden & Midgley.
The WW1 Commemoration Project is commemorating each man on the 100th anniversary of his death and aims to publish, in print and on the website, all their stories. If you can help the Project with research, or would like more information, please contact the Luddenden WW1 Project by email on WW1@luddenden.com or phone 01422 885141. For more on the progress of the project, please click here
The Project would like to hear from anyone who is a descendant of one of the 45 men who died in the First World War and who is commemorated on the Luddenden & Midgley war memorial or who knows someone who is. A second strand is to involve the current residents of the homes from which the men marched away. The aim is to link both those who still live in the local area and those who live further away with a four-year programme of events.
Mel Powell, who initiated the project, said “The overall aim of the project is a very simple one: that every single one of the men who marched away from Luddenden and Midgley is linked with someone in his own home village to remember him as an individual during the four years of the national commemorations.
“Ideally, that would be a family member, so our first task has been to trace their descendants or relatives. But if no-one can be found, we’ll be contacting whoever lives at his old address in the village to ask them to ‘adopt’ him and to join us in commemorating him at key dates in the next four years.
“We’d like to contact the descendants of the WW1 servicemen who are commemorated so that they can take part in the project if they still live in the local area. If they live too far away for this, we’d still like to ask them to contribute to the research – or simply to let them know that their relative is still known by name and remembered in his home village, one hundred years later.”
