Over the years, and due to a number of reasons, various cemetery sites and individual graves could no longer be maintained by the CWGC. We call these sites and graves 'abandoned'. Usually, the abandonment occurred as the sites were declared unmaintainable, possibly due to their physical setting, or changes in the political situation in th [..]

These are special types of memorial panels, which are included on some memorials to allow additional names to be added and recorded. Names which had been missed from the original memorial panels, for a variety of reasons, can be added to the memorial on these addenda panels. These addenda panels act as a temporary commemoration for the individuals [..]

This is where an individual is commemorated at a different location to their actual place of burial. This is usually due to reasons beyond the our control, where it is no longer possible to mark or maintain the registered war grave and where exhumation and reburial in a war cemetery or plot is impossible or impracticable. Alternative commemorations [..]

This refers to any corrections made to the original data held by the CWGC in relation to a particular casualty. Amendments have been made over the years as new evidence has been supplied.

This was the part of the British Army which was responsible for much of the early work of exhumation, concentration and reburial of the war dead from the First World War. The CWGC maintained close links with the service, and received all the reports they produced concerning graves and burial sites, which formed the basis for much of the CWGC's [..]

The Army Graves Service moved burials from isolated and unmaintainable sites into established war graves after the end of hostilities in 1918. This process was referred to as concentration of remains, and was undertaken to ensure that the CWGC's commitment to providing commemoration to all of the Commonwealth war dead could be achieved and mai [..]

This refers to the process by which individuals were dug up after burial. Sometimes this occurred to try to establish the identity of the individual, but more often graves were exhumed as part of a process undertaken during the initial construction of war cemeteries, when individuals buried in smaller burial sites, or in isolated graves, were broug [..]

This term is used to refer to war dead from non-Commonwealth forces whose graves or memorials are maintained by the CWGC.

While there is a great deal of variety in the memorials maintained by the CWGC, all of them include areas on which the names of the war dead are engraved. These areas are made up of many individual stone panels, which can be replaced as and when necessary without affecting the core structure of the memorials themselves.

Where an individual had a known grave and a CWGC headstone could be erected, and if contact with the next-of-kin could be established, the relatives of the deceased were invited to have a personal inscription included on the headstone. These inscriptions were limited to no more than four lines of text, each containing no more than 25 letters, altho [..]