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