War memorial research explored on Border Life

Watch Paul’s episode here (the segment starts at 11.40).

Local military historian Paul Goodwin highlights the importance of war memorials in a recent episode on ITV’s Border Life.

As a founding member of the charity The Scottish Military Research Group (SC043826), Paul's research has shown there are over 550 war memorials in D&G, most of which were not on record when he began his research in 2006.

Image courtesy of Carsphairn Archive

The Scottish Military Research Group aim to inform and educate the public about Scottish military history and to help people research their military ancestors. They are various ways to support their projects, from transcribing to donating photos; see their website for more information - http://www.scottishmilitaryresearch.co.uk/.

Paul believes war memorials are vital not only for for education and family history researchers but in order to ensure younger generations remember this vital part of our history.

Paul said: "It should be remembered, and commemorated, if for no other reason than to remember that war is a bad thing and we need to do all we can to avoid it.

All these lives cut short, all these people who never married, never had children, the people who were never born, the generations that were never born, so it continues to have an impact.

In this area, people went away to war and never came back...the whole community changed as a direct result of the first world war."

Click to download.

Paul has created a list of people commemorated on the main war memorials of the Glenkens, and the list itself is now a registered war memorial.

His other works include the recent Galloway Glens Last Flights booklet, as well as many Glenkens Gazette articles over the years.