When I first started what became the Death and Service project, the process was driven by the photography. Getting out and abut with my camera, visiting parts of Somerset I hadn’t seen before, led to St Michael’s Churchyard in Dinder, where Gilbert Drew’s headstone caught my eye.
It was only when I returned home and started going through the images I had taken, that I considered seeing what else I could find out about this Somerset Light Infantry Private. The research I undertook was completed using the Ancestry website, the tool I had completed a lot of my family history research a few years back, and something I was comfortable with.
This produced limited results, basic information about his background and access to his military records that shed a little light onto his service and the medical condition that led to both his discharge from the army and his ultimate passing in July 1917.
As I continued photographing the county’s villages, I began to deliberately seek out churchyards to see if there were any war graves in them, and the idea behind the larger project began to take shape. Where I had initially shared my findings as part of a larger photographic blog, I now set up a specific website for the stories I uncovered.
By now, the idea to photograph and research all of the Commonwealth War Graves in Somerset was beginning to take shape. From a purely practical level, I knew my focus was going to be on the headstones from the First World War: information was less readily available for those who fought and died in the 1939-1945 conflict. In particular, when I started back in 2020, the last publicly obtainable census document was the return taken in the spring of 1911.
To save me rambling aimlessly through Somerset’s graveyards and cemeteries, I needed direction. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) are responsible for caring for the graves of both global conflicts at more than 23,000 locations across the world, and so I used their website to locate the headstones before even setting out with my camera.
The website and accompanying smartphone app enable you to identify churchyards and cemeteries with CWGC graves in them, providing details of the location and names of those buried there. The information is fairly comprehensive, including regiment, rank and service number, along with next of kin, where available. The website provides access to scans of the service personnel’s entry in the War Graves of the British Empire register, as well as the respective grave registration report form and details of the headstone.
The majority of the information is also available to download in spreadsheet form, which then helps the budding researcher like me to target specific locations and photograph the headstones without the need to aimlessly hope that they have one or more First World graves in them. Camera at the ready, I was more prepared for the off…
Death and Service 