Welcome to the War Memorials Project

Leicestershire County Council launched the project in 2009. We invite you to help us in recording and researching the war memorials and casualties of Leicestershire and Rutland, from the medieval period to the present.

In the first two years, our Project had raised the number of recorded memorials from 860 (recorded by the Imperial War Museum’s UK National Inventory of War Memorials) to over 2,000 for Leicestershire and Rutland. We now have over 3,000 records for memorials, and over 15,000 records of casualties.

Hundreds of volunteers have been involved, and new information and family memories are sent to us all the time. Our aim is to collect and organise this information in our large, searchable database that is free for all to access.

With the support of local projects that are rediscovering unknown memorials and uncovering life stories of the fallen, we now have an amazing online resource.

A large proportion of our WW1 casualty data comes from the work of Michael Doyle, a local historian who has published a multi-volume work entitled Their Name Liveth For Evermore: The Great War Roll of Honour for Leicestershire and Rutland.

The conservation of war memorials has also been one of our priorities, and we have given grants to specialist conservation work across the county since the early 1990s. Our War Memorials Conservation Grant Fund closed in 2020, due to financial constraints brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Project Activities

  • Creation of a detailed online archive of war memorial and casualty information focussed on Leicestershire and Rutland.
  • Recording and reporting on the condition of war memorials.
  • Provision of expert conservation advice.
  • Raising the profile of war memorials and their care.
  • Digitisation of photographs and documents relating to memorials or casualties.