War grave

I found some memorials at home to an officer who was buried at Varennes on the Somme and recognised his name.

When I checked the details I had a photograph of his headstone and noticed the date of death differed to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records and the memorials and contacted them and they confirmed it was wrong and it would be corrected.

So my question is, how common are mistakes on gravestones, understanding they were engraved in an era without databases and computers? And have you ever identified an error and had it corrected? Well, in Belgium and France alone, in that area of the Western Front, there are more than half a million headstones in the British and Commonwealth cemeteries.

A huge, huge number.

So given the scale of the task, I think mistakes were inevitable.

And some mistakes were picked up on when the next of kin went to visit a grave in the interwar period or see a name on a memorial.

And there is some correspondence about this in the archives of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

And since then, as interest in the commemoration of the dead and research into the soldiers who died in the Great War Since that's grown with the increase in family history and the general interest in the First World War growing too, then a lot of people have discovered more and more and more mistakes.

So you're on that long stretch on the back, and you're going by the cedar trees, and right on your left, before you go into the big curve at the mural, that is the plot with all the Confederate stuff, where the flagpole is.

Right across from that is the marker of the unknown, and then right, like... maybe 40 feet from that is where he's trying to go to Veterans Cemetery.

Well, an interesting thing about the marker of the unknown is that in 2009, the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated the Isabel Tucker Hardwick monument at Fort Hill in memory of the unknown Confederate dead.

Yeah, she's over there.