Can we find or track instantiations of a work item template?

We want to create a set of common work items that each of a set of top-level projects should address.  Creating the set of work items as a template is straightforward enough, but at a top level, we want to be able to go back and see what each project's status is in addressing each of these.

Is there any way to find all of the work items that were created from a specific template (item), even if they're in different projects (but on the same server)?  One approach we thought of for doing this is to create a master set of tracking work items and have the template items link back to this, but when we export the template from one project and re-import it into another the links back to the master items get lost.