As a fairly well established community and hyperlocal site in Cardiff, we’ve found our motivation and responsibilities changing as we’ve evolved, and we’ve achieved much more exposure in the local area than we ever would have thought when we set up RoathCardiff.net.

Whilst we are still rooted in the goings-on and happenings of Roath people, groups and community events – since we are now fortunate enough to attract quality guest posts about all of these things (we can’t be everywhere!) – and of course keeping an eye on the levels of rubbish, bad parking, and lost animals, we felt that the centenary of the First World War demanded special attention.

Initially, knowing that there are several churches, rolls of honour and memorials, and a primary school that operated as a military hospital during WW1 in the locality, we thought it would be fitting, as a community website, to mark the centenary with some posts picturing these places, and mapping those from the area who had fallen in the Great War.

We could have incorporated this into our current website, with us doing some research, and using the excellent photographic skills of two of our team members.

By chance, I found out that the Heritage Lottery Fund had a specific funding stream for projects relating to ‘The First World War: Then and Now’. How much better could our project be, and our contribution to community history be, if we were to be awarded funding? We started to have ideas about creating an online hub for community stories – people living in Roath and the surrounding areas could tell us their stories of relatives who had lived here, and went to war; who had stayed and worked in essential industries; who undertook all sorts of activities on the Home Front; and those who conscientiously objected to the war. All of these stories would be fascinating, and we were convinced that many people had heirlooms that they might have forgotten about, or be interested in us helping them to research their relatives online.

One of the most telling things about the horror that so many people witnessed during the War, is that most of them didn’t tell. They didn’t speak of their experiences; they didn’t share their experiences – it just wasn’t done. Because of that, many families had and have only the vaguest recollections of their relatives’ wartime experiences.

Nevertheless, we know that people have medals, letters, service records and other items that have been passed down, but with perhaps only a limited backstory. People are proud of the role their relatives played, and often, without knowing the full story, they and their families have felt the repercussions of the War for generations.

The so far limited research on our part has shown that even when service people, nurses and doctors, and people in other roles, survived the war and returned home – or indeed stayed at home working and supporting the war effort – were so traumatised that they wished only to get on with their lives, and try and forget the horrendous times they had lived through. If people have any stories at all, they are fortunate, as we all need to learn from their experiences, and build links between the older and younger people in our community, so that that learning can happen.

This is how we see our role in this project. Commemoration, for those who lived and died during the war. Illumination, for younger generations, who might hitherto have seen the War as nothing to do with them, or know nothing about it. Making it real, for children at school now, to see how children their age played a part, and how they felt about it. Discovery, to find out and preserve the Great War stories and objects of the Roath community.

This is probably our last chance to involve people in a digital project who remember parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ tales of this war and to be able to realise the impact, first hand, that it had on those generations. We are going to do our very best to record for posterity our community history, and make sure that Roath Remembers.

Visit the website: http://www.roathremembers.net

Follow the project on Twitter @RoathRemembers