Shaftesbury Remembers The Great War 1914-1919

In March 2015 Gold Hill Museum received £6,700 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for a project to research the personal stories and experiences of people from Shaftesbury and the surrounding villages during the Great War.

Our volunteers worked with as many local sources of information as possible to discover how war affected daily life, individuals and communities in the Shaftesbury area. One of the team, Christopher W. Stupples, investigated the lives of the men and women commemorated on 25 war memorials in Shaftesbury and surrounding villages in Dorset and Wiltshire. The results of our research can be accessed on the website:

Shaftesbury-remembers.goldhillmuseum.org.uk

The website is in two main parts:

Stories: about the people who served in the Great War from 1914 to 1919.

Background: focusing on life in and around Shaftesbury before, during and after the war.

We felt it was very important to collect family stories before they are lost forever, and to share them with future generations. Over 90 people talked to us, allowed photographs to be scanned and donated artefacts now displayed in Gold Hill Museum. This unique archive of local and family history can be viewed as hard copy in a series of folders in Room 8.