How Many Names on Your War Memorial? Counting the First World War Dead Place by Place in the War Memorials Register

The Imperial War Museums' War Memorials Register records the United Kingdom's war memorials and, for many, how many names they carry. I use it to ask how many First World War dead each community's memorial names, and how heavy that is relative to the size of the place. The register as retrieved holds 111,532 memorials, 76,160 of them for the First World War. Summed over every memorial they carry 2,496,396 names of the First World War dead, about 3.4 for each of the roughly 744,000 dead and missing from the British Isles, because the same man is named on village, church, school, workplace and regimental memorials. I therefore group memorials into 17,967 places and take one community memorial per place, never adding memorials together; this cuts the total to 727,184. For 6,108 villages and small towns of 100 to 5,000 residents with an exact count and a modern population from Wikidata, the median memorial carries 18.3 names per 1,000 residents today (middle half 10.7 to 30.0). Rates fall steeply with modern size, are highest in Scotland (30.0) and lowest in Wales (12.0); for 181 places with a 1911 census figure the median is 29.9 per 1,000 residents of 1911. Only 36 of the 6,108 small places have a community record with no dead, 8 of them Thankful Villages. Modern populations are a weak proxy for 1911, and the register is incomplete, so the results describe what memorials record rather than true losses. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/war-memorials/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/war-memorials. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/war-memorials/.