9th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (British Army)
Date Of Birth:
06/06/1896
Died:
01/07/1916 (Died of Wounds)
Age:
20
Summary
William James Orr was the eldest son of John and Sarah Jane Orr. He was born on 6th June 1896 in the Killyman area of Dungannon. He was the oldest of at least eleven children. His father was a blacksmith. The family moved to Belfast for a time and then moved back to reside in Killyman / Ballynakelly. William Orr enlisted in Omagh with the 9th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Private William James Orr died of wounds on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916.
The Thiepval Memorial will be found on the D73, next to the village of Thiepval, off the main Bapaume to Albert road (D929). Each year a major ceremony is held at the memorial on 1 July. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme is a war memorial to 72,337 missing British and South African servicemen who died in the Battles of the Somme of the First World War between 1915 and 1918, with no known grave. It is near the village of Thiepval, Picardy in France. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Thiepval has been described as "the greatest executed British work of monumental architecture of the twentieth century"