Thanks to Ted Shaw, a teacher at Lower Canada College, another man gas been added to the Canadian Virtual War Memorial.

Robert Anderson Gault had just finished studying at Harrow, in England when the war broke out.  He returned to Harrow to prepare for the army, and joined the Grenadier Guards in January, 1916.  He was promoted Lieutenant on September 10th, 1916, and was killed in action six days later.

Ted found the entry for Gault in the book “Harrow War Memorials” Volume IV, and sent me a note. I checked the Canadian Census and found that he was, indeed, born in Canada, and his parents were living in Canada. All the information was collected and set off to John Brehaut at Veterans Affairs Canada. John verified the information and added the entry.

Another World War 1 Canadian is now properly commemorated.

Thanks Ted. Thanks John.

Canada’s last  veteran of the Great War, John Henry Foster Babcock, died at the age of 109 at his home in Spokane, Washington, on Thursday, February 18.

Babcock enlisted in the CEF in February, 1916, at the age of 16. Because of his age, his service was restricted to Canada and England.

Babcock, who has lived in the United States for the past 60 years and had dual citizenship, will be will be cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Pacific northwest mountains.

The most commonly heard phrase around our house is “Gracie, get your brother’s head out of your mouth!”. Since we were adopted by 3 young Samoyeds one and a half years ago, our personal life has been turned upside down. We’ve always had dawgs in our house, but never three that are all, at the same time, healthy and energetic. These dawgs, have ensured that we never have a dull moment, and that there is a perpetual reason to smile. Bodey, the oldest, is the most affectionate. Dodger, in the middle, always needs attention, and finds the most creative ways to get it. Gracie is the youngest, and the only one that we know the actual birth date of. Her original parents got her from a breeder, and when she was a bit less than 6 months old, surrendered her to a rescue group because “she had too much energy”. Well, they were right, to our gain. There are two schools of thoughts on dawgs in a family. One says “Never let them outnumber you”, and there is a certain wisdom to that. But the other is that with three, they will always have someone to play with. And it woks that way with us. Gracie plays with Bodey until he gets tired, then she jumps on Dodger, then turns to us, and by then, hopefully, Bodey is ready to go again, because Gracie, like the Energizer Bunny, just keeps going and going.  Gracie is also the most elegant and graceful Samoyed I’ve ever seen, more like a Greyhound, or a gazelle, than a sled dog. She can easily clear a 3 foot fence, but chooses not to, she knows she has it good here. She can tell time, and barks within 60 seconds of 7:30 PM if they haven’t been fed. She is not a girlie girl, and loves to get in trouble, especially if she can blame it on Dodger. It’s hard to imagine anyone happier than Gracie and some mud! This is one of the more iconic photo’s of Gracie:

And today she is 2 years old. So, for all the joy that you bring to Penney and I, as well as Bodey and Dodger:

Happy Birthday, Gracie.

It seems that I am always late in getting things done around the Canadian Great War Project. External influences seem to crop up that I can’t avoid … I’ve used up more gas in my snow plow in the past week than in the past year (it seldom snows in Columbus, Ohio).

But I wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone that has contributed to this site. The magnitude of what we set out to do in 2005 seemed daunting at the time … identify and profile over 650,000 Canadians that served in the First World War.

Over the past year we have added almost 17,000 names to the database, and over 1,300 War Diary entries. Special thanks to the following for contributing the bulk of the entries:

These include complete nominal rolls based on embarkation lists for some of the overseas battalions, and the database holds what is probably the most complete list of Canadian Nursing Sisters.

Thanks largely to Marika Pirie and Anne Hales we’ve added 78 new newspaper and letter transcriptions which go a long way to giving us a glimpse into the life of the men and women that served.  Almost 650 images were added to the site as well.

I’m sure that, at times, we wonder if the effort that we put into this is worthwhile. In 2009 there were 43,134 unique visitors to the site, with over 1,400 on November 11th. Both of those are huge numbers! Many were looking for ancestors, but in the past year I’ve had schoolteachers expressing their gratitude for making the information available, and the database served as a primary resource for a very creative project by the Toronto Star.

The bulk of my time with this site is in answering eMail from visitors (several hundred in 2009) and in maintaining the integrity of the data on the site. Thanks to TomCEF and RNWMP for your help in doing this.

Every week I get a few eMails from people expressing their gratitude for the content that we have in the Canadian Great War Project. I want to pass these on to all of you, and to thank you for all of your efforts. Together we’ve established a pretty site that helps preserve the memory of the Men and Women that served in the conflict, and at the same time provides a pretty good little research tool.

Thanks!

marc

I got an eMail from Mike Norton the other day. He was letting me know that, using information from the embarkation roll, the Libraries and Archive Canada site,  and the Nova Scotia vital statistics site, he had completed entering all the men that served with the 112th Battalion.

The 112th was formed in Nova Scotia between November 1915 and April 1916. They trained near Windsor, Nova Scotia, then departed for England on 23 July, 1916.

In England, the 112th was broken up with the men providing reinforcements for other combat battalions.

Thanks to the information that Mike has entered, we get a good profile of the men who formed the unit. They were largely Canadian born (91%),  and native to Nova Scotia.  They were of average height (5 foot, 7 inches) and ranged in age from 14 to 57 (average 23). The average age of the 189 men from the unit who died was 24 (oldest 46, youngest 16). The majority were Baptists (38%).

In total, thanks to Mike’s work, there are 1,207 men that are associated with the 112th Battalion that are in the Canadian Great War Project database.

Next up, he’s going to tackle the 25th Battalion.

Thanks Mike. We appreciate all this work!

Thanks to Marika for finding this and bringing it to my attention.

The Toronto Star had developed an interactive map showing the men from the Riverdale area of Toronto that died during the Great War. Web editor Patrick Cain developed the map using the Canadian Great War Project database to help in his research. He has identified over 180 individuals from the area that died during World War 1, and has put them on a map; a poppy signifying each location. The result is a very intense visual depiction of the direct impact that the war had on communities.

Please take a look at the map. Seeing the results visually is a very powerful way of seeing how the war changed lives in such a small area.

It’s also nice to see that the effort that everyone has put into this website is appreciated. Being able to search using any of the words or phrases that appear in either comments, or anywhere in the attestation papers, rather than just names or regimental numbers, was something that I had hoped would be of use to people, and something that doesn’t exist in other databases. This site is truly a community effort, and it’s good to see that the results of everyone’s efforts are being well used.

The servers that host the Canadian Great War Project are going to be undergoing an upgrade sometime between Midnight and 5:00 AM US Eastern time on September 24. During this period, the Canadian Great War Project will be unavailable for a period of approximately 15 minutes.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but this is a necessary upgrade that our hosting company is implementing.

Sometimes fate gives us a chance to do things that we might otherwise miss.

A couple of weeks ago I was updating the cause of death for all the Nursing Sisters in the Canadian Great war Project. When I got to Henrietta Mellett, I noticed that the Cause of Death in Ed Wigneys Roll of Honour was listed as “Drowning”.

Henrietta Mellett was born in Galway, Ireland in 1883, and enlisted in London, Ontario in January, 1918. She appears on the 1911 Census, so she immigrated to Canada sometime prior to 1911.

As with any attempt to reconstruct events from over 90 years ago, there is some degree of speculation, but it is likely that her family had moved from Galway to Dublin and was living there in 1918. It is likely that Henrietta Mellett was returning to England on 10 October 1918 after visiting them. She was aboard the mailboat R.M.S. Leinster, with a crew of 77 and 694 passengers, bound for Holyhead, Wales  when it was attacked and sunk by the German submarine UB-123 just before 10:00 AM. The Leinster went down about 6 km outside of Dublin Bay. The official loss of life was 501 personnel, and it was possibly higher.

Fate came in to play when I saw that her body had been recovered and she was buried in Dublin. My wife and I were planning an Irish vacation, so last Tuesday, 3 weeks after looking up her cause of death, on a drizzly morning, I found myself in Mt. Jerome Cemetery in Dublin. I located her grave, as well as the grave of Private Fryday, the only other Canadian buried there. Nursing Sister Mellette is buried with her brother and sister, with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission marker atop the grave.

It is very satisfying to be able to be fortunate enough to have found that she was buried there, and to be able to make the trip to the Cemetery to honour her memory.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but the link to the entries in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) database is no longer displayed at the bottom of the soldier display forms.

Sometime over the Labour Day Weekend, the CWGC updated their web site, and the result is that it is no longer possible for me to automatically generate a link to the CWGC pages. I’m not sure why CWGC made this change, but it is likely to cause problems for many people who have links to specific entries on  many different web sites.

I’ll continue to look at this, but in the interim you can go to the main CGWC search engine(link here) and search for the name yo are looking for.

Update 12 September.  It seems that the CWGC has seen the error of their ways, and the old link format is back working again, so it is once again available from the Canadian Great War Project.

In a little town in rural England is a churchyard with a single Military grave, Private Edward Smith of the 3rd Battalion, CEF. Guy Ellis has done extensive research on this soldier and written up his history in the British publication “History Journal”. Please give it a read, it’s a fascinating look at what happened to some of the soldiers who enlisted, and fell ill while in England. And a great way to honour a Canadian soldier.

Note: The article, “Wellington Down”, accessible on the same site, deals with the Second World War Flight Sergeant (Pilot) James McCausland from Marysville. New Brunswick.