A NEW team of volunteers is helping create a digital record of every Keighley News article about men who died during the First World War.

The Men of Worth Project has recruited townspeople to transcribe hundreds of wartime articles so the information can be included in a massive computer database.

The results will provide a wealth of information for researchers, local families whose ancestors fought in the war, and the Keighley News’s weekly Men of Worth column.

Men of Worth, run by military historians like Andy Wade and Ian Walkden, has undertaken a long-term project to gather a full record of every Keighley person who has fought in past conflicts.

For the past few years Mr Wade has been creating text files for each person who served from 1914 to 1919, the year after the war ended, with information gleaned from census records, county archives and the Keighley News.

To help him with the onerous task he issued an appeal on the Men of Worth blog asking people to help type in the information in each weekly ‘Local War Casualties’ article in the wartime Keighley News.

He received a dozen replies, and each person has been sent a photograph of a newspaper cutting to transcribe.

Mr Wade said: “Usually I have done the transcribing on an ad-hoc basis as I research an individual, so I'll transcribe that paragraph, paste it into his notepad file and leave it until more information comes forward.

“I have also transcribed en-bloc several months of Local War Casualties columns for the exhibitions we have done for the Battles of the Somme, Arras and Third Ypres/Passchendaele in recent years.

“We will use these as the basis for a whole archive of transcribed material to run chronologically from and this will become an archive in its own right.”

Mr Wade said that storing information digitally offered many advantages to local history researchers.

He said: “We can instantly find details of a man by using the computer's search box to access other information like all the men who worked for George Hattersley & Son, or went to a particular school.”

Mr Wade said the information in the newspaper articles often provided new lines of enquiry for the Men of Worth to find out more about a particular person.

One Keighley News article showed that local man Thomas Smith Shackleton had attended the Royal College of Art, so the Men of Worth contacted the college and it has now added him to their memorial.