Jonathan F. Vance: Virtual Records Of WWI Canadian Expeditionary Force Keep Memory Alive
[Jonathan F. Vance holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture in the history department of the University of Western Ontario. He is also the author of Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War.]
As a child, I was fascinated by my grandfather's hands. They were long and bony, and covered with skin that looked so thin and papery that I was afraid it might slide off.
I had some vague idea of what those hands had done decades earlier -- carried 18-pound artillery shells, steadied the reins of an ammunition horse, manhandled an artillery piece into position, dug gun pits into the mud of Flanders -- but my fascination lay mostly in the fact that I loved his handwriting. He had gone to school in England in an age when penmanship still mattered, and he always signed his name in a tight little script that seemed impossibly neat.
He always took great care with his appearance -- he hated his grandchildren to see him without his false teeth -- and his fastidiousness came through in that signature.
As I got older, my curiosity about his war grew -- so much so that I spent part of a summer cycling around the battlefields that he had known as a young man. Then when he died at the ripe old age of 92, I was devastated. I felt I had lost the one tangible connection with an historical event that, because of him, had become my passion. The First World War seemed to me, quite suddenly, so distant.
...
In 1996, Library and Archives Canada began a project to digitize and post on its website the attestation forms filled out by men and women when they enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. It started modestly at first, but luckily for me one of the first groups of records to be finished included surnames beginning with the letter S. And so one day, I carefully typed my grandfather's name into the search field: William Thomas Starr. I knew that I would see a standard government form, completed in the hundreds of thousands between 1914 and 1919, but I wasn't expecting the effect it would have on me. There was his name, date and place of birth, next of kin, and, at the bottom, the signature that I had loved as a child. But it was no longer small and cramped, as I had known it; it was bold and assured, the signature of a strong and confident working man about to set out on the greatest, and most terrible, adventure of his life. Up to that time, I had only known my grandfather as a senior citizen; now, I felt like I knew him in the prime of his life.
Since then, I've spent countless hours looking at virtual attestation papers -- so much so that my kids tend to call out plaintively, "Mom, Dad's on the CEF website again!" But in my defence, it's not just idle web-surfing. This is one way to bridge the years to an event that seems so distant to us; these digitized images have a way of personalizing a war to which many Canadians feel no personal connection.
So I use my professorial authority at the University of Western Ontario to force my students to spend some time with these records and, more often than not, they're glad they did. They have found relatives that they didn't know had enlisted. They encounter all of the curiosities of the industrial workforce of pre-1914 Canada -- I think I know what a wire-drawer did, but what on earth was a core-maker? They find no end of fascinating questions -- what could have induced Syrian-born Charles Kalif, a storekeeper in Sydney, to enlist in a Nova Scotia Highland battalion? Why did the CEF decide to conscript Ernest Gould, despite the fact that he was lame in one hip and had an atrophied muscle in the other thigh? They learn that Edwardian Canadians were much shorter than Canadians in 2005, and that if you weren't a Protestant or a Catholic when you enlisted, you could only be an "Other." One student, a recent immigrant to Canada, even found a soldier who, 90 years earlier, had lived in the very house that she now lived in.
Soon, the First World War will be a full century behind us. The veterans will be gone, and even those who were children during the war will be few and far between. But the event need not slip from our collective consciousness, because even something as simple as a digitized image on a computer screen has the power to connect us to that earlier time. Whenever I click on his attestation paper, I get a vivid mental picture of my grandfather, not old and stooped as I remember him, but straight and strong, confidently signing his name, collecting his khaki uniform and marching off to war.
As a child, I was fascinated by my grandfather's hands. They were long and bony, and covered with skin that looked so thin and papery that I was afraid it might slide off.
I had some vague idea of what those hands had done decades earlier -- carried 18-pound artillery shells, steadied the reins of an ammunition horse, manhandled an artillery piece into position, dug gun pits into the mud of Flanders -- but my fascination lay mostly in the fact that I loved his handwriting. He had gone to school in England in an age when penmanship still mattered, and he always signed his name in a tight little script that seemed impossibly neat.
He always took great care with his appearance -- he hated his grandchildren to see him without his false teeth -- and his fastidiousness came through in that signature.
As I got older, my curiosity about his war grew -- so much so that I spent part of a summer cycling around the battlefields that he had known as a young man. Then when he died at the ripe old age of 92, I was devastated. I felt I had lost the one tangible connection with an historical event that, because of him, had become my passion. The First World War seemed to me, quite suddenly, so distant.
...
In 1996, Library and Archives Canada began a project to digitize and post on its website the attestation forms filled out by men and women when they enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. It started modestly at first, but luckily for me one of the first groups of records to be finished included surnames beginning with the letter S. And so one day, I carefully typed my grandfather's name into the search field: William Thomas Starr. I knew that I would see a standard government form, completed in the hundreds of thousands between 1914 and 1919, but I wasn't expecting the effect it would have on me. There was his name, date and place of birth, next of kin, and, at the bottom, the signature that I had loved as a child. But it was no longer small and cramped, as I had known it; it was bold and assured, the signature of a strong and confident working man about to set out on the greatest, and most terrible, adventure of his life. Up to that time, I had only known my grandfather as a senior citizen; now, I felt like I knew him in the prime of his life.
Since then, I've spent countless hours looking at virtual attestation papers -- so much so that my kids tend to call out plaintively, "Mom, Dad's on the CEF website again!" But in my defence, it's not just idle web-surfing. This is one way to bridge the years to an event that seems so distant to us; these digitized images have a way of personalizing a war to which many Canadians feel no personal connection.
So I use my professorial authority at the University of Western Ontario to force my students to spend some time with these records and, more often than not, they're glad they did. They have found relatives that they didn't know had enlisted. They encounter all of the curiosities of the industrial workforce of pre-1914 Canada -- I think I know what a wire-drawer did, but what on earth was a core-maker? They find no end of fascinating questions -- what could have induced Syrian-born Charles Kalif, a storekeeper in Sydney, to enlist in a Nova Scotia Highland battalion? Why did the CEF decide to conscript Ernest Gould, despite the fact that he was lame in one hip and had an atrophied muscle in the other thigh? They learn that Edwardian Canadians were much shorter than Canadians in 2005, and that if you weren't a Protestant or a Catholic when you enlisted, you could only be an "Other." One student, a recent immigrant to Canada, even found a soldier who, 90 years earlier, had lived in the very house that she now lived in.
Soon, the First World War will be a full century behind us. The veterans will be gone, and even those who were children during the war will be few and far between. But the event need not slip from our collective consciousness, because even something as simple as a digitized image on a computer screen has the power to connect us to that earlier time. Whenever I click on his attestation paper, I get a vivid mental picture of my grandfather, not old and stooped as I remember him, but straight and strong, confidently signing his name, collecting his khaki uniform and marching off to war.