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ABOUT THE DATABASE AND CASUALTY LIST
The Great War database and casualty list contain details
of over 900 men and women who have some connection with
the Lisburn area and died during the Great War. The
area, roughly Lisburn Local Government District, stretches
from Dunmurry in the east to Moira in the west, and
from Glenavy in the north to Dromara in the south. These
are individuals who were born or lived in the area or
whose next of kin lived here. Also included are those
who are buried in the borough or who are commemorated
on one or more of its memorials.
The information about these people has come from a
number of sources. The memorials in Castle Street in
Lisburn, at the junction of Mill Street and Grand Street
at Hilden and at the bottom of Main Street in Hillsborough
provided the starting point. More information has been
added from church memorials, the memorial in Friends’
itself, the Orange Hall in Glenavy and from the headstones
of bereaved parents and relatives as well as some of
the casualties themselves in graveyards throughout the
length and breadth of the borough.
The War Office casualty lists, published in 1921 under
the title, “Soldiers Died in the Great War”,
Irelands Memorial Record published by the Irish National
War Memorial Trust in 1923 and the records of the Commonwealth
War Graves Commission provided the basic details about
such things as the units men served in, the date of
their death and their place of burial or commemoration.
More personal details have sometimes been available
from attestation papers and other records stored in
the Canadian National Archive and the Australian War
Memorial. Like the CWGC records, these are accessible
on the Internet. Information about the background they
came from and sometimes what happened to them has usually
come from the two local papers of the day, the “Standard”
and the “Herald”.
As for the time span covered, it extends beyond the
end of the war itself. Partly this is because a number
of men died of wounds after the Armistice, but it is
also because a number who died after November 1918 appear
in the CWGC Northern Ireland Register of, “Those
who fell in the Great War”.
The information contained in the two formats is essentially
the same. The casualty list gives short biographies
while the database records the basic details under a
series of headings ranging from surname through place
of birth and address to place and date of death, age,
and place of burial or commemoration.
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