CWGC Volunteer wins prestigious Museum and Heritage Volunteer of the Year Award

We are delighted to share that CWGC Volunteer Nick Ezra was the joint winner of the prestigious Museum and Heritage Volunteer of the Year Award for his work on the Punjab Registers Project. 

Nick began volunteering at the CWGC in 2021 as an Eyes On, Hands On volunteer, looking after 9 sites across Norfolk with a total of 23 war graves. In 2022, he became involved with supporting our Non-Commemoration Team, where he has been involved with multiple projects. 

Firstly, Nick checked and transcribed casualty information from 915 archival records for the King’s African Rifles. 

This work requires a keen eye for detail and a great deal of patience and skill, especially when transcribing original handwritten documents. Nick’s work is clear and concise, and greatly sped up our ability to commemorate these individuals through his quick and thorough examinations of the data.

Nick has also been central to our analysis of the Punjab Registers. 

These registers contain the names of over 300,000 men from the Punjab who served in the First World War. Working in collaboration with the UK Punjab Heritage Association and the University of Greenwich, these files have been digitised and the data extracted and transcribed into Excel spreadsheets. 

As the CWGC were aware of a gap in their records, it was decided to undertake a volunteer-led exercise to compare the 15,925 individuals listed as dead in the Punjab Registers against the 74,000 Indian names held in the CWGC casualty database. By the end of October 2025, Nick had actively checked all 15,925 names. 

Upon being awarded, Nick Ezra said: “I am proud on behalf of the whole volunteer community, and I am proud of the CWGC. It really is an important thing that we are doing, both staff and volunteers, because I was not alone. It is a different part of the United Kingdom’s heritage, and it is very important to do it.
 
John Burke, CWGC Senior Research Historian, said: “It was a truly exceptional effort, and I cannot stress enough how important Nick has been to the work of the Non-Commemoration Programme. His tireless efforts, the speed and quality of his work, and his continued desire to always do more continues to inspire and amaze me.”

Michele Jennings, Chief Marketing Officer and Director of the Commonwealth War Graves Foundation, wrote: “I'd like to warmly congratulate Nick on his award, which is thoroughly deserved. 

"His care and attention to this significant volunteering project epitomise how so many of our volunteers donate the generous gift of their most precious asset - their time - to the mission of the Commonwealth War Graves.
 
"We are immensely grateful that we have many volunteers like Nick, and I am delighted that his diligence and commitment has been recognised in this way.”

Congratulations to Nick for his wonderful achievement, and all other nominees and winners of the 2026 Museum and Heritage awards.