Welcome to New Forest War Memorial Book Project

How we work - We are not a charity, nor do we make personal profit from these books.

Financially, the team meet the costs (about £1,000 per book) of research themselves. We all strongly believe that people who died for their country should be remembered as individuals, not just as names on a War Memorial and that ensuring this is a project worth paying for. We do ask relevant Councils or other organisations and individuals for support to meet the printing costs for each book. But any surplus from sales is donated to charity. This year (2010) we have given £400 to both the Poppy Appeal and Help for Heroes, with a further £30 sent to Regimental museums in recognition of help received.

The team that researches and writes these books has developed skills in finding out - sometimes obscure - pieces of information about individuals and their service careers.

But a key characteristic of the individual Memorials is the description of each person, upbringing and family background. This can only be provided by present-day descendants of the individuals concerned. Thus each book – Pennington has Joan Stephens, Minstead Carole Standeven, Bransgore Jane and Michael Safe, Sway Tony Blakeley, Hordle Peggy and Jude James etc – has a local volunteer who can trace down such people and encourage them to provide information and photographs for individual Memorials. These are written by the team in ‘locum tenens’ for the individual’s family. Where such descendants are found then their approval is sought before the publication of the Memorial.

We are trying to complete the research of all those people from the New Forest who died in the Great War, by its centenary in 2014. Currently we are working on NEW MILTON, which should be published by October 2011. This leaves:

BRAEMORE	BARTLEY	BURLEY	DIBDEN	ELING	FAWLEY
FORDINGBRIDGE	LYNDHURST	MARCHWOOD	NETLEY MARSH	RINGWOOD	SOPLEY	TOTTON

t o be researched.

If any Council would like the names on their War Memorial to be researched or if there is anybody prepared to act as ‘link person’ for a project, could they please contact us to enable a meeting to be organised to discuss the ramifications and timetable involved.