Was someone on your street killed during WWI’s Battle of Vimy Ridge' | Globalnews.ca

So it's the 97th anniversary of Vimy Ridge.

My tour pics are still up if you missed it the first time round..

expat-canadians-f45/remembrance-day-2012-in-flanders-fields-t103100-15.html

Vimy starts on page 2.


These maps from this article are really cool, I traded emails with Patrick after he had just Toronto out.
nice to see he has expanded to other cities as well.

It's also interesting to see just much our cities have grown over the years.

My street was full of cows in 1917 but there is a particularly poignant memorial plaque hanging in our local St. Jude's Anglican Church. This kid had just turned 18 8 days before the battle and 20 days before he died. He was a boy soldier but an experienced one by Vimy as he was already a Corporal and winner of the Military Medal on top of it. He also lingered 10-12 days after being wounded. Usually "gut shot" soldiers or those who didn't have their amputations quickly died lingering deaths of their infections in the years before there were any antibiotics.

One more thing, that sir-name does not appear in Oakville anymore, not on place names nor street names and you have to wonder if he was an only son, as well. It was a small town until fairly recently and those old families left their mark behind.

My street is only 8 years old so there's no chance.

Oddly years ago I was surfing Military records and came across enlistment papers for WWI soldiers and found some local addresses. I took a drive by a few of them and although back in the day they were some of the nicest houses, they were pretty run down now. The only exception was the ones that had huge wealth and very large houses. They are still quite something to see, with a few of them having Carriage Houses on the property.

No map for Edmonton eh?

My current street would've been a farm at the time, but the area I grew up in (Calder) was around. I know there are pictures of soldiers inthe Calder Community Hall and a cenotaph for the Calder boys killed. Pretty sure it's from WW1 but I'll pay more attention next time I'm there.

The enlistment forms of the WWI vets have been on line for some time now. I looked up my Great Uncle's papers and found a ... truth bent. He boldly wrote down his age as "18" in 1915. (He was born in 1900.) He was in the artillery as a mule skinner and he went everywhere that the Canadian Corps went. Those guys weren't front line infantry but quite often, they were in more danger than the foot soldiers. They were constantly moving up and down the communications trenches which were usually targeted by the Germans so that supplies wouldn't reach the forward trenches. Anyway, he survived (was lightly gassed somewhere along the way) and lived to be 94.I remember him talking about his wartime experiences when he was in his mid-80s, though and he suddenly burst into tears. They would probably call that PTSD in the modern world. Men of that generation suffered in silence.

http://globalnews.ca/gnca-ajax/contact- ... 223%22%7D/
You can write and bitch here.

Far as I know, he works by himself on this.
You only need to find the casualty, date of death, burial place,
then crawl through the 600,000 records to find his attestation papers with his home address, then plot it on a map.

No big deal.

I wasn't complaining, more hoping someone would correct me with a link to a similiar Edmonton map.

Should actually be pretty easy for me to figure out on my own. I'm pretty sure our cenotaph has all the boys from the neighbourhood on it.