Project update - July 2014

Firstly my apologies for the lack of blogging in recent months; hopefully I am back on track to post regular updates!

Just because the blog was quiet that doesn’t mean our project has stopped – it is quite the opposite.

There has been much happening in the last year of the Ryde goes to War Project and we are getting busier as we near the Centenary of World War One.
 

Some of the things we have been working on:
 

·        Continuing to identify and research all service men & women with a connection to the Ryde district prior to and during the war years.
 

·        We have searched the available local papers for names, and references to the service men & women, as well as any events in the local home front during the war years; and we have created an index to these references.
 

·        The Field of Mars Cemetery, Ryde, was walked and all headstones with a reference or memorial to World War One have been sought out, listed and photographed.

Members of the Ryde District Historical Society preparing to search the Field of Mars Cemetery for any World War I memorials or headstones, August 2013.

·        Planning for the Ryde District Historical Society’s Centenary of WWI events, including the publication of our research, has begun.
 

·        We have representation on City of Ryde’s Centenary of WWI Committee, and are working with Council on access to our database, and supporting their events.
 

·        We are assisting Ryde Library with their “Ryde Remembers 2014-2018” events across their branches.

·        Our volunteers or family connections have begun to write the stories of selected names in our database for our planed RGTW publication.

Project Update — September 2013

My apologies for the lack of blog updates in recent months, but a bereavement and a birth in my family, has kept me distracted from updating the blog.

Yes – the Ryde goes to War Project is still progressing – our latest update:

In our database we currently have 2,075 names of Service people with a connection to the Ryde district. These have been collected from various Honour rolls, War memorials, embarkations rolls, local newspapers, etc. Most just list a family name with an initial or two. When these rolls, memorials and reports were created a hundred years ago, the Ryde community would have known exactly who they were honouring, but today many are unknown or forgotten. We want to identify these men and the few women and at the least find their full names and service numbers and their connection to the district. Many on our list were born in the area, educated or worked in the area; others are proving harder to find the connection for.

So far we have been able to identify,

 with full names and service numbers, 1,349.  

726 are still to be identified.

304 of them never returned home, and we currently have photos of 105 of their headstones or memorials.

We have also made contact with the families of 78 service people from our list

 and have found photos of 114 of them.

The number of Nurses, Sisters, or Matrons found on our list is currently at 11or 12 (depending if Nurse N. Hall, turns out to be the same person as Nurse Marion Hall...

What our team has been up to……

• In August we got together to discuss our project with many of our team of researchers. We have more than 20 working on the project including one joining us when possible from Victoria! Each has been focusing on a specific letter and working on their group of surnames; some have completed their groups and we are starting to collate the data, while others are still hunting!
• We also have representatives on the Ryde Anzac Centenary Committee Ryde Council’s WWI Centenary taskforce and are working with them to ensure the data we collect will be accessible into the future.
• We had planned a transcription and photographing day at one of our local cemeteries, Field of Mars, in June, but it was rained out.  The sun shone on our July date and we were able to tackle various sections to hunt out any headstones that included war service information or memorials. A few of our team are following up on this and more details will follow.