Strachur & District History Society produced a booklet to commemorate the lives lost named on our Memorials
How often do you walk past a war memorial without giving a thought to the names written there? You know they are the local men who died while serving in a war, but unless you are in your local area or a place your ancestors came from you will probably not know any of the people listed there, and may wonder what would be the point in reading a list of names? The purpose of this book is to make those whose names are listed on the WW1 memorials in Strachur and Strathlachlan more than just names. We have done our best to find out who they were through war records and through Statutory Records and the Census. Sometimes we have found obituaries or have information from their descendants or people who knew the family. Some of these men were so young when they died that records can say very little of them. The last census before the war was in 1911, when some of these men were still at school, and when the 1921 Census is made public none of these names will be there. Sometimes we can tell you more about parents and in some cases ancestors much farther back. For older men, the fact that records are made public only after 100 years means that there is little we can tell about what happened to widows or children they left behind. The stories show what varied backgrounds these men came from and something of the different occupations they followed, or would have followed had their lives not been cut short. We hope that we have gone some way to showing these men as real people and not just names on a memorial. November, 2018
Lauder Monument
John holding parasol, next back right Colin , front of Colin is Niven
Two names on the memorials we were unable to find any records about – Private James Fergusson, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and Private George McKay, Cameron Highlanders.
In the course of our research we have come across other names not on either memorial but whose connection to the parish we felt qualified them for inclusion. Our source for some of these names is the two Rolls of Honour which hang in Strachur Church, one being British Legion, the other coming from the United Free Church. These list the names of men and women who served in the war, indicating which of them lost their life.
