Our heritage, the places and people where we come from, are an important part of the culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. In towns small and large around the country, memorials stand to commemorate the fallen who served in the New Zealand Wars, World War I and World War 2. Wouldn't it be good to be able to stand in front of a monument, and see more than just names?
The New Zealand Memorials Register contains locations and photos for over a thousand war memorials across the country. In order to help people today to connect the names on those memorials with the people who lived and served before them, we want to connect this information with personnel records from the Online Cenotaph database.
In order to make those connections, we are setting up a website to import data for each memorial, and use crowdsourcing to transcribe and classify the text from those images. We hope that this will become a useful tool for New Zealanders who want to research their local history, and find out more about their families and whakapapa.
If we can help families and historians to successfully match up these names with the people they commemorate, it could help New Zealanders to engage with and learn about our shared past through telling their personal stories. It could also become a useful resource for visitors to the country, helping them to understand the history and culture of the people who live here.
"The Sorrow And The Pride" is an homage to The Sorrow And The Pride: New Zealand War Memorials by Chris Maclean and Jock Philips (1990).