Every year the names on the war memorial in a North Yorkshire village are read out on Remembrance Day. Sharon Griffiths hears how one couple determined to find out about these men who died for their country.

THEY were names on a brass plaque in a village church. Nineteen of them. Not even full names – just initials, surnames and regiments.

Those who had known them once long ago were long dead too, and so nothing was known of them – only that they all had links to one small village and had died for their country in the war to end all wars.

Their names were read out in church each Remembrance Day. But they were just names.

And they could – like so many others – have faded forever into the past and history. Instead they have, in a way, come alive again.

In a remarkable project, one couple have traced the names of all those young men on that village war memorial. After all these years we know who those men were, where they lived and where they lie buried. What’s more, every grave has been visited.

Middleton Tyas, near Richmond, sent a remarkable number of men to the First World War. Nearly every week of the war, The Northern Echo, in a bid to boost morale – and, no doubt, sales – published pictures of men from various towns and villages in the region who were serving at the front. Mostly there were a dozen or so. When it came to Middleton Tyas, there were more than 50 photographs – and they were just some of the men who went.

“Very few villages with like populations have met the country’s call so generously,” wrote the Echo approvingly in September 1915.

Nineteen of those young men never returned.

A huge sacrifice for such a small place.

Each year, Chris Wiper Gentry, who lived for many years in Middleton Tyas and is now in nearby Moulton, would hear the names read out as part of the remembrance service and sit there thinking how little was known about them. “It was partly because it was just an initial H Armstrong, W Best... I wanted to know more, who these lads were, if only what the H stood for.”

Two years ago, she and her husband, John Gentry, began their research.

“The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was a brilliant site. The first person I found was A Liddle – Alix Liddle, we learnt – who was already dead at the time of the Echo article. He was in the Durham Light Infantry and it turned out he was one of more than 100 people killed in the bombardment on Hartlepool in 1914.”

Alix Liddle, 25, was buried in Darlington Cemetery, so Chris and John went to find him.

“Before we went, we bought a cross and wrote on it ‘Remembered in Middleton Tyas’ and placed it on the grave. By then, I was so pleased to have found him, that I thought I’d like to do it for them all.”

As they continued their research, helped by the publication of the 1911 census, but often put on the wrong track by a misspelt name or wrong date, they learnt snippets about the men.

“Mostly they were aged between 18 and 30, ordinary young lads who’d grown up together.

They were farm hands, horsemen, gardeners, stockmen. We learnt that one – a Stead – was known to have been a good cricketer. But they probably all knew each other. It would have been like the entire cricket team going.”