Every Name on the Wall

The memorial at St Ninian's has two hundred and eleven names on it and until 2016 nobody knew who any of them were beyond a surname and an initial.

This is normal. It is the thing people find hardest to believe about war memorials and it is true of most of them: they were put up in 1921 by committees who knew perfectly well who everyone was, and who therefore did not write it down, and within forty years there was nobody left who could tell you which of the four Fentons was on the wall.

Douglas Aitchison retired in 2016 and started with name one.

The method

You start with the parish. Then the 1911 census, then the electoral rolls, then the service records — of which about sixty per cent burned in 1940, which is the single fact that shapes this entire field of research.

Then the local paper, which is where it actually gets done. Small papers in 1915 to 1918 printed everything: the casualty lists, the letters home, the photographs, the four-line notices from families.

Douglas has read every issue of the Advertiser from 1913 to 1921. That is four hundred and eleven issues on microfilm and it took him two years and he would do it again.

What he has

Two hundred and ten of two hundred and eleven, done. Full name, date of birth, address in the parish, occupation, unit, date and place of death, and — where he could find one — a photograph.

Nine years.

He has a folder for each. The folders are in nine box files in the spare room and his wife has stopped mentioning it.

The results are on a website that a girl from the high school built for him for nothing in 2021 and that gets, he thinks, about eleven visitors a month, which he considers a triumph.

Name one hundred and forty

McKendrick J.

There is no J. McKendrick in the parish in 1911, 1901 or 1891.

There is no J. McKendrick in the electoral rolls before or after the war.

There is no J. McKendrick in the Advertiser, in any context, in nine years of issues, and Douglas has now been through them three times specifically looking.

There are McKendricks — a large family, four households, well-documented, and Douglas has traced all of them. None served. None died. The initials do not include a J in any generation for sixty years either side.

What he has tried

Every McKendrick in the county. Then the country. He has, at various points, had a list of four hundred and eleven J. McKendricks who died between 1914 and 1919 and has eliminated all but nine, and cannot connect any of the nine to this parish by any thread at all.

He has considered transcription error — that the stonemason cut the wrong name — and has looked for the committee's original list, which does not survive.

He has considered that the man was a lodger, or a farmhand who moved on, or somebody's son by an earlier marriage under a different surname.

He has considered, and rejected, and reconsidered about four times, that somebody in 1921 put a name on that wall that did not belong there.

Why he cannot stop

He has been asked this, kindly, by his wife and by the minister and by the girl who built the website, who is now twenty-two and doing a history degree and who blames him for it.

Two hundred and ten of two hundred and eleven is, by any standard anyone would apply, a completed project. It is a genuinely significant piece of local history and there is a version where he writes it up and it is published and that is that.

Douglas's answer is not sentimental and he gets slightly annoyed when people supply him with a sentimental one.

His answer is: the whole point of the thing is that it is a list of people, and a list of people with one entry that is not a person is not a list of people, it is a list of two hundred and ten people and one mistake, and he does not know which of those two it is, and until he does he cannot honestly publish either.

What happened in October

A woman from Winnipeg emailed the website.

She had found it looking for something else. Her great-grandmother, she said, had emigrated from this parish in 1920 and had never spoken about it, and there was a photograph in the family of a young man in uniform with nothing written on the back, and she wondered whether anyone local would recognise the cap badge.

Douglas recognised the cap badge in about four seconds. It is the county regiment and there are eleven photographs of it on his own website.

He asked her to send everything she had.

What she had

A photograph. A ring. And a birth certificate for a child born in this parish in November 1916 to an unmarried mother, with the father's name left blank.

The mother's surname was McKendrick.

Where it stands

The child was a girl. She emigrated with her mother in 1920 and died in Manitoba in 1994.

She was not J. McKendrick. There is no J. McKendrick.

But there is a woman named McKendrick who left this parish in 1920, four months before the memorial committee met, and whose name Douglas now knows, and whose child's father is a young man in a county regiment cap badge whose photograph is in Winnipeg and whose name is on nothing at all.

Douglas has not been able to prove any connection between that man and the name on the wall, and he is aware that he may be constructing something.

He has, however, worked out what the committee minutes of 1921 mean when they record — and he had read this line perhaps forty times without seeing it — that the list was compiled "from the church roll and from such other information as was offered."

Offered.

He is going back through the microfilm for a fourth time.

He is seventy-four. His wife has stopped mentioning it in a different way now.