During the period 1914-1918, the magazine Irish Life published a supplement called Our Heroes which contained photographs and short biographies of Irish officers and men in the British Army who were either killed in action or were mentioned in despatches for acts of bravery.
As part of the Decade of Centenaries, South Dublin Libraries embarked on a collaboration to digitise and put online this hitherto unavailable resource. Using photographs of pages from the original publication supplied by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, with the permission of the National Library of Ireland, South Dublin Libraries Local Studies created searchable text from the page images using Optical Character Recognition software, isolated the portraits of the men and enriched the data by including the place of burial of those who fell, which was not included in the original work.
1,600 men’s names and short biographies are available to search. There are many Kilkenny men represented in the database. The brief biographies cover many subjects including schools, colleges, universities, regiments, ships, cities, towns, professions and banks on the island of Ireland and (the then mainland) Britain.
The Our Heroes database is available by clicking on the following link:
http://ourheroes.southdublinlibraries.ie/
