For generations, some families held on to little more than fragments of memory.

A great-grandfather who had left for the First World War and never returned. A faded photograph tucked away in a trunk. Stories passed down at family gatherings about a soldier whose sacrifice was remembered at home, but nowhere else.

For many, those memories never found a place in the official record.

More than a century after the guns of the First World War fell silent, that has finally begun to change.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has officially recognised 9,909 Indian soldiers whose deaths had never been recorded in its First World War casualty records. 

The breakthrough came through an extraordinary research project centred on 34 handwritten Punjab Registers preserved at the Lahore Museum, an archive that helped recover the identities of thousands of servicemen from pre-Partition India, many of them from Punjab, whose wartime sacrifice had remained unrecorded for over 100 years.

Together, the volumes documented nearly 3.2 lakh Punjabi recruits who served in the British Indian Army during the war. 

Their rediscovery has helped restore the names, identities and sacrifices of soldiers who had remained absent from official commemoration for more than 100 years.

A discovery that began with 34 handwritten books

The breakthrough can be traced back to 2014, when historian and author Amandeep Madra, co-founder of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, came across the Punjab Registers while researching military history.

As he told The Tribune, historians had long known such registers existed, but few expected to find them inside an art museum.

The significance became personal almost immediately.

One of the earliest registers Madra photographed belonged to Ambala district, where his own family hailed from. There, he........

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