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How will your donation help?

DONATIONS allow us to continually develop our work and finally tell the story of these families:

•           support looking after the Visitors Centre building (heat light and upkeep to keep it open);

•           ongoing research and  collation of these stories, continually expanding our database of information which allows us to help families;

•           archive costs including insurance and security:

•           to continually develop the Visitors Centre interpretation and our work to relocate and interpret an original WW1 hut on site.

One of the most important aspects of this project is to rebuild the information on the people who lived at Knockaloe and in Patrick 100 years ago. This will take time to collate. It is estimated that at any one time over 23,000 internees lived at Knockaloe as Internees, spread across 4 camps split into 23 compounds, each housing around 1,000 internees, as well as the thousands of guards, however sadly the records from that time were destroyed and only fragmented and incomplete information remains.

Even within families, the fact that a family member was interned as an “enemy alien” was often never discussed, and so the information is hard to come by and will need to be painstakingly recorded as people contact the website and visit the Visitors Centre.

It has already taken over 10 years of detailed research and collation to bring together the information collated to date on over 45,000 men interned during WW1. It will take many more years of research in many different documents, archives and collections around the world to rebuild this information, and also to go beyond this and tell the story of lives of the internees, the village and the wider families of those who were here many years ago. With many of the descendants being grandchildren of the internees, they are likely to be the last generation to remember first hand these people, and therefore time is against us.

By donating today your support is invaluable in contributing to the ongoing work of the Charity, in maintaining and developing the Visitors Centre, the Collections and in ongoing research.