Since 2008 Newport man Shaun McGuire has built up a series of websites researching the war dead of Gwent. He talks to MARTIN WADE about his quest to list all of Gwent's fallen.

My motivation to set up the websites came when I was researching the death of my cousin Arthur Fitzgerald. He was in Bomber Command during the war and the Lancaster he flew in was shot down in a raid over Germany in 1943.

He had earlier flown in a daring raid to destroy a secret rocket research station at Peenemünde in northern Germany.

It was fascinating how responses came from far and wide. A Belgian journalist contacted me and told me he knew the name of the man who shot down my cousin's aircraft. He helped me find the pilot, Leutnant Ludwig "Luk" Meister, who was by then living in Southern France. I got his number and phoned it and his wife answered. She spoke perfect English but said her husband only spoke German and that I could write to him to ask any questions I might have.

She asked where I was calling from and when I said Wales she said "Mein Gott! [My God! In German]".

He wrote back to me in German which I had help in translating from St Julian’s School. He was shot down himself by an American aircraft in 1945 was injured and was still suffering the effects of his injuries.

He said he still had nightmares about the night he shot down the Lancaster. He said he was flying over Nuremburg when suddenly this enormous, four-engined aircraft came flying straight towards him.

He took evasive action and only just avoided colliding with the aircraft. He survived and of course went on to shoot my cousin down resulting in his death. Arthur was only 20 and was said to be the youngest Pilot Officer in the RAF.

Interestingly I have also had a lot of help from German journalists over the years after I put out appeals including in stories in the Argus.

The association of my cousin's unit 207 Squadron also put out an appeal for people to tell them where squadron members were buried. I found out that there was a squadron member in St Julian’s and another buried in Trevethin. I printed out maps from Google and used them to find the graves. The grave in Trevethin churchyard was overgrown and the headstone had toppled over. It was such a sad sight. As I was about to go I said to myself "at the going down of the sun, we will remember them" but I thought "no-one will remember you".

It wasn't just overgrown or damaged graves like this one. There was no single place where the war dead of places in Gwent were listed. The names on the Cenotaph in Newport are not all of those from the city who died, for instance.

In 2007 I had a heart attack and on my first day out of hospital I bought a digital camera. I went to Newport library and spent an afternoon photographing pages of the Argus from the First World War. I took 500 pictures in an afternoon and then spent the next six months getting the text from the obituaries and putting the website together. It was part of my recuperation.

I ploughed through the pages of the Argus from 1914-1921 and 1939-1947 and built up the website.

It was the desire to find out about my own family which made me start to do it, but I felt that I had to honour all the people who died.

It is very important to remember all these people. One of the reasons I have included photographs is so we can see how young they were.

I hope that youngsters studying the world wars would use the sites as a resource and realise the bravery of people not much older than them who had lost their lives.

It is quite time-consuming and I work on it pretty much every day. Each day I put up the people from Newport who died on that day in wartime on the Newport's war dead Facebook page. I feel it's a way for their sacrifice to be acknowledged.

I have built quite a few websites in the last eight years, some of which try to build a complete list of all those who died in war for their areas. There is a site for Newport, Cwmbran and Monmouthshire and Waterford – the town in the Republic of Ireland where my family come from.

There are thousands of names on the websites now and it's taken thousands of hours of work over the past years.

I get lots of queries from people researching in this area. A local historian Richard Frame recently used my website to find information about a grave he was looking for. I'm glad that people can use it to research their own families too.

A man I know went to the library in Newport to find his relatives in the Roll of Honour which he believed would have all the names of the people from Newport who died in the war. He couldn’t find them and when I heard this it made me more determined to create a place where all their names would be listed.

I never anticipated it would become the one place where you could find all those who died in both world wars and other conflicts of this century. I never thought I'd still be doing it nine years later!

Shaun’s websites can be found here:

Newport: newportsdead.shaunmcguire.co.uk; Cwmbran: cwmbransdead.shaunmcguire.co.uk; Monmouthshire: mw.shaunmcguire.co.uk; Waterford: waterfordsdead.shaunmcguire.co.uk; facebook.com/newportswardead and lancastered627.shaunmcguire.co.uk