Remembrance Day Project

On Remembrance Day last year, I walked with Katy Whitfield along leafy residential Durie Street in the Toronto neighbourhood known as Bloor West Village. Whitfield is a public school teacher and the moving spirit of a project called “They Walked These Streets, We Will Remember Them.”

Later, I returned to walk the street’s full length. I started where the street does, at Morningside Avenue near Lake Ontario. I climbed the hill up to Bloor Street and continued north to where Durie ends at Dundas Street. It’s about 2½ kilometres.

On the way, I passed at least 27 addresses that were homes to young men who went out to serve in Canada’s wars — and never came home. Cpl. Henry Aishford, killed in action in Belgium in 1916, once called 19 Durie home. Cpl. Arthur Bensley, who died of his wounds in 1943 at Casa Berardi, Italy, lived at 703 Durie. Between them lie the houses of 25 other soldiers, sailors and fliers who never returned.

The internet changed all that. Today, anyone with online access can go straight to searchable databases where they can enter a surname, choose between a sailor or a pilot or a nurse, and seek out local or distant addresses that once were homes to fallen veterans. Teachers and others have been seizing these online opportunities — and finding meanings there that can seem quite different from standing with a crowd on Nov. 11 to honour all the Canadian war dead together.

“They Walked These Streets” was born in Toronto in November 2020, when Whitfield got a call from her colleague Ian Da Silva. Pandemic restrictions had closed down many public remembrances, but Da Silva and his own young children had discovered they could slice pieces from an old red pool noodle and make each one into a charming poppy on a bamboo-skewer stem. They were thinking of holding a personal memorial on their front lawn by “planting” some of these.

Whitfield offered to give Da Silva notes on a few soldiers from streets near his — including Durie, where she herself had grown up. She had a source; she knew of the online Poppy File, created by Toronto journalist Patrick Cain. He had taken a City of Toronto index-card file of names and addresses of fallen Torontonians and posted the data on an interactive map, with a poppy symbol to mark each home. In a couple of days, Whitfield and the Da Silva family had an improvised Remembrance Day memorial: a lawn blossoming with the Da Silvas’ pool-noodle poppies and Whitfield’s notes on 13 of the neighbourhood’s fallen.

Local personal memorializations such as these depend on ready access to names, dates and individual data. Cain’s Poppy File was an early example of digitization; others include Library and Archives Canada’s military personnel files, Seward’s “Lest We Forget” website and the “Canadian Great War Project.” A key online source is the Canadian Virtual War Memorial (CVWM), run by Veterans Affairs Canada. It pays tribute to each of the more than 118,000 Canadian casualties of war, dating from 1885 (the Nile Expedition) to the recent conflict in Afghanistan. Online since 2000 (“The dawn of the internet!” says Amanda Kelly, a CVWM manager), it was the only national online war memorial in the world until recently. Canadian actor R.H. Thomson cites Canada’s online memorials as an example as he tries to persuade all 34 countries that engaged in the First World War to digitize and display the names of their fallen soldiers in his ambitious “The World Remembers” project — in some cases by opening up handwritten lists no one has looked at in 100 years.

The CVWM has more than two million views and 800,000 extended online visits a year; it distributes print materials to schools, youth groups and legion halls across the country. One feature: It invites site visitors to contribute. Many of the CVWM’s pages preserve personal photos, handwritten letters and other memorabilia alongside the official record.

At Westmount High School in Montreal, Chantal Clabrough has done Remembrance Day projects with her students for more than a decade. History, she says, “is a subject that we need to be more hands-on with,” and the value of direct engagement with archived historical sources is immense. As her students used online databases to supplement local knowledge and the school’s memorial plaque, “they were really doing history,” she says. When they research a soldier who was a fellow student who sat in their classrooms, a powerful awareness is born.

Whitfield has made the same discovery. It’s the personal encounter that matters: “I’ve had students shriek at me, ‘He lived on my street!’ ” Many of her students come from families new to Canada and have had little connection to this country’s wars. Yet, months after one Remembrance Day project, one boy approached her just to say quietly, “Ms. Whitfield, this is the day my sailor died.” Students like him don’t forget that one person, she says.

I know what she means. Gregory Joseph Clancy died at the age of 20 on April 16, 1945, in the sinking of HMCS Esquimalt, the last Canadian warship sunk by enemy action in the Second World War. Years ago, I learned from the Poppy File that he lived in the house next to ours almost 50 years before we moved there. An only child, his parents long since dead, he might easily be forgotten. But now he seems like a neighbour. I think of him on Remembrance Day. A kid from our street.