Have you ever wondered why most of the entries in Library and Archives Canada (LAC)  Soldiers of the First World War – CEF database have attestation papers, but roughly 8% do not? I know that I have, and I’ve also wondering if LAC would ever get around to adding them. I knew that they existed; I had ordered complete copies of some records from LAC for soldiers with no on-line papers, and the attestation papers were included in the packet. So why weren’t they on-line?

The answer comes from Arnie Kay, a former LAC employee who now does freelance record searches.

According to Arnie, some years ago the Military “vetted the CEF files and removed various non historical docs from these files.  They also removed all the surplus Attestation copies and put then into large binders.  You guessed it.  When they did the Attestation project they used the binders and of course there were many of the CEF files that only had one copy and this is the reason why so many gaps in the Attestation data base.   They have no intention of trying to resolve this oversight.

At least we now know why they are missing, and that LAC will not be attempting to fix this at any point in the future.

Note: if you are want to track down more information on any Canadian who served in the Great War, check with Arnie kay. He has very reasonable rates and a sterling reputation as a researcher.

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!

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.

Dion Loach has completed another Nominal Roll, this time for the 159th Battalion.

The 159th, also known as the 1st Algonquin's,  was based in Haileybury, Ontario, in the Temiskaming region of Northern Ontario. The unit began recruiting in late 1915 in the districts of Nipissing and Sudbury. After sailing to England in November 1916, the battalion was absorbed into the 8th Reserve Battalion.

Thanks to Dion for providing yet another Nominal Roll.

Hugh Little  and and Barry Keighley have composed a video honouring the Canadian's at Passchendaele. They did this to honour the memory of two great uncles who fought in the Great War. Hugh's great uncle William M Little died at Passchendaele on November 10, 1917 and Barry Keighley's great uncle, Frank Gresty, died at Gallipoli, July 13, 1915. Please give it a look.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGVmOS9yM6M

A couple of months back I was contacted by Nigel Jones, the Senior Archeologist for the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, one of four of the Welsh Archaeological Trusts. They had been excavating a walkers’ cairn on top of what may be a Bronze Age burial cairn, which is on the summit of Penycloddiau Hillfort, near Ryhl. At the base of the walkers’ cairn, they found a stone inscribed “Carly(e) D Chamberlain, Canadian Army, Prospect, Kentucky, USA.” Although there was no date on the stone, other stones had dates between 1898 and 1922. Nigel was intrigued by the stone and asked if I could help out. Looking at the attestation papers, I told Nigel that I suspected that Private Carlyle De Haven Chamberlain (regimental number 2140651) had enlisted late in 1918, and had likely been en-route to Europe when the armistice was signed. He was likely in Kinmel Camp, near Ryhl, in early 1919, as this was one of the major demobilization camps for the Canadians in the U.K.

Nigel was nice enough to send us a photo of the stone, and to include the Canadian Great War Project in the acknowledgements for their project report.

I have just released the latest version of the CEF Soldiers from the Great War program. Version 4 is a complete rewrite, based on changes that were made in the Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC) database. It also includes links to Courts-Martial information.You can find the download here.

This program provides a flexible way of searching through the index to records in the "Soldiers of the First World War" database provided by Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC). It does not add any new information, and any errors that exist in the LAC site will also be in this database.

Wile the personnel at LAC are to be commended for the superb job they did rewriting the search engine for the database, it isn't flexible for doing advanced queries like "Give me all the names of people born in 1891 that have a name starting with McW and have a 6 digit regimental number starting with 13".

This program allows queries like the above, and can be done off line. There are links to the LAC site, so you can easily navigate to the right attestation paper record in the LAC database.

Ther eis still quite a bit of work to be done to improve the database, specifically with mapping the soldiers in the Courts-Martial area to soldiers in the general area. This is a manual exercise, and takes quite a bit of time. Anyone that would like to volunteer to help, please let me know. I will release an update once this work is complete.

Dion Loach has been a very busy man. In the past couple of months he has transcribed the nominal rolls for the Railway Supply Detachment (1915), Borden's Armoured Battery and the 1914 and 1915 Nursing Sister embarkation rolls. Each of these contains a link to the completed entry in the Canadian Great War Project, the Library and Archives Canada attestation papers page, and the Canadian Virtual War Memorial. These provide a great, easily searchable reference. I’m guessing, but perhaps we may see the Canadian Overseas Railway Construction Corps sometime in the future.

Several weeks back, Ryan Shepard finished the embarkation roll for the 19th Battalion. Ryan started this as a way of honouring his grandfather, and I don’t think he realized the amount of work that was involved, but he persevered over the course of 18 months, and finished it. I asked Ryan if he was willing to take on another. He said that “He’d get back to me” on that.

I’m becoming quite a bottleneck for certain rolls. Chris Henzler has been plugging away at the men from the 31st Battalion. Chris started working on the Canadian Great War Project several years ago, trying to find the men on the Hedley, British Columbia monument. Chris isn’t from BC, in fact he is U.K. born and bred. He had seen the memorial once, got interested, and started to transcribe attestation papers. Chris has also taken photographs of a number of U.K. cemeteries. I need to update the links on the 31st Battalion nominal roll with all the entries that Chris has put in.

Marika Pirie has been quietly entering information on the Canadian Nurses. The Canadian Great War Project has the largest searchable list of the Canadian Nursing Sisters that served during World War 1. I have a lot of work to do to update the links based on the entries that Dion, Marika and others have put in.

And there are others that are working their way down some of the awards lists. Again, these are being entered faster than I can keep up with.

Gary Silliker, when not on active duty with the Canadian Forces, has been entering the men from the Miramichi, New Brunswick Memorial, and is starting on the Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia men. Gary is going to be overseas this summer/fall, and we all wish him safe travels.

And there are many others that I haven’t mentioned, that are busy working on their own projects. I don’t hear much from them, they just plug away. The result is that we are compiling a truly valuable resource for both researchers and the folks that want to know a bit about their past.

As with any posting like this, I run the risk of missing important contributers. Obviously this isn't my intention, there just are a lot of you out there.

Many thanks to all of you for your efforts. Please take a minute and add a comment to this post describing what you are working on.

And, if you haven’t been there lately, take a look at the Rolls and Awards page. I think you’ll be impressed.