Readers can assist Remembrance Day project @We Are The Dead
This Remembrance Day, Postmedia is once again asking readers for help in honouring one of Canada's war dead.
In each of the past nine years, Postmedia has put together the story of a Canadian soldier whose name was randomly selected on Remembrance Day. The name of this year's featured soldier will be generated Wednesday at 11:11 a.m. by an online memorial, the Twitter account @WeAreTheDead.
The automated account, established in November 2011 by former Citizen reporter Glen McGregor, publishes 24 names a day. Each is drawn at random from an official list of the 119,531 uniformed Canadians who died in service to their country.
A new name is published at 11 minutes past every hour, a process that will continue until 2025.
As in past years, we will need your help to produce the Remembrance Day profile, which must be assembled – starting with just a name – in a single day.
Crowdsourced material is essential since the vast majority of Canada's war dead were killed in the First and Second World Wars. Sometimes, biographical material is difficult to find.
In the first year of the project, for instance, Leading Aircraftman Chancy Melvin Simpson was the subject of our story. The 24-yearold New Brunswicker died from cancer in a Nova Scotia hospital in 1944, but left little trace of his life.
The project has more fully portrayed John Cawley, an Irish immigrant and Saskatchewan farmer who died at Vimy Ridge; Joseph Aldéric Boucher, the son of a Quebec cheesemaker who perished at the Somme; Pte. Henry Rohloff, of Manitoba, who died late in the Second World War when he stepped on an electrified cable; and Pte. Edwin Booth, a British immigrant and farmer who died in the Battle of Mount Sorrel in June 1916.
Four years ago, a rich portrait emerged of Flight Sgt. Stanley Spallin, a 20-year-old pilot from Edmonton who died in a crash while patrolling the English coast in November 1942. He left behind an unborn daughter, Yvonne Holden, whom we found and interviewed in Mount Lehman, B.C.
Three years ago, we told the story of First World War Gunner Faus Metcalfe. Metcalf, 19, was killed in August 1918 at the start of a decisive offensive known as The Hundred Days.
Two years ago, it was the story of George Jameson, a bricklayer who came to Canada from Yorkshire, England in search of a more prosperous life. He enlisted in Winnipeg and died in the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915.
Last year, we unfolded the drama of Sgt. William John Brown, a wireless air gunner from Theodore, Sask., who died on a training flight over Lake Erie. When the pilot had a seizure, Brown was one of three men who parachuted from the doomed plane. He drowned in Lake Erie.
This year, we again invite genealogists, historians, military buffs, and ordinary readers to help us develop the profile, which will be published online late Wednesday.
If you'd like to help, please follow @WeAreTheDead on Twitter and watch for the name posted at 11:11 a.m.
Email any biographical details you can find to reporters Andrew Duffy at aduffy@postmedia.com and Blair Crawford at bcrawford@postmedia.com or editor Drake Fenton at dfenton@postmedia.com. You can also tweet information directly to @citizenduffy, @Get-BAC or @drakefenton. We'll be using the hashtag #wearethedead.