Honouring the past
Prince County brother and sister create memorial in memory of family who served
“This is just our way of remembering, because we can’t forget what they did.”
Frances McAlduff
Standing beside a table she’d arranged with photos and medals and other items honouring her late father and uncle, Frances McAlduff explains the significance of her home’s 100th anniversary armistice display.
“Well, we can’t forget. You just can’t forget. We wouldn’t – you wouldn’t — be here. I wouldn’t be here. Al wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.”
The “them” she refers to are not just her father, Frank, who safely returned from the First World War, and her uncle, Jim, who lays buried in a cemetery in France, a casualty of the Great War, but all the men and women who fought for Canada and the Commonwealth.
Frances and her brother, Alvah McAlduff, put up in their home an annual Remembrance Day display to honour their father, his brothers Jim, Wilfred and Ed, and their mother’s brother, Billy Carter, for their First World War service, and their brother, Merrill, who served in the Second World War.
This year’s display was extra special, though, as it marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice, which was signed on Nov. 11, 1918. Frances and Alvah chose to focus their display on Frank and Jim because they had signed up for the war while living in P.E.I.
Their father, Frank, made it to England where he contracted spinal meningitis. They suspect that might have been what prevented him from being sent to the battlefields of France, what saved him from the fate that awaited Jim there.
“Dad, apparently, had written home, to, likely his mother, and said in his letter, ‘Where Jim is, he won’t be coming home,’” Alvah said.
Their father, who died in 1979, didn’t talk much about the war and they didn’t press him.
“He just couldn’t talk about it,” Frances said.
Frank served as an air raid warden during the Second World War. Alvah and Frances still have the steel helmet, emblazoned with a “W”, that he wore when heading out on rounds in town once the siren sounded.
The McAlduffs’ display also included their father and uncle’s medals, a plaque displaying Jim’s death medal, a photo of his headstone, and a copy of a page out of the Book of Remembrance displayed in Ottawa.
“This is just our way of remembering, because we can’t forget what they did,” said Frances.