Janey Jensen and Terry Harris grew up with their grandparents and wanted to remember their war effort at a Whanganui service on Thursday morning.
Both were at the service to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.
"It's an honour to be standing here remembering them 100 years on," Ms Jensen said.
Her maternal grandfather Bernard Tamatea Pokaiwhenua Walden, from Kaiwhaiki, was a member of the Maori Pioneers in World War One.
While at primary school her daughter Saffron researched the Battle of the Somme. Imagining what it would have been like, she wrote a fictitious letter home from a soldier in the trenches there.