Update on Blog

The blog is progressing well and I am learning a lot along the way. At this time I have approximately 44 soldiers to be added to the Soldiers Pages in the blog where I have done the initial research and now need to go back and redo the research and properly document this in a database I have created to keep track of the soldiers I have added to the blog.

I also have several soldiers I am holding in abeyance until such time as I can spend a concerted and concentrated effort given the depth of information collected about them. As well, I have several side projects I need to attend to but I wanted to get the soldiers listed first that I have discovered so far.

The listing of the soldiers has become a much more intensive process then I first thought it would be. One of the areas that is slowing me down is where I find a soldier who survived the war I make it a priority to add them to the Canadian Great War Project‘s database. This is necessarily time-consuming because every effort is made by me to record the data from the attestation papers correctly. So on top of creating a database entry; downloading attestation papers and other images and trying to find other information on the Internet, each new soldier that survived gets recorded at the CGWP’s web site.

Coupled with this I review the soldiers of the 18th Battalion (and other soldiers found during research) that died during the Great War at this site and often the information that is listed is incomplete and I painstakingly fill out the data from the attestation papers to the soldier entry so that a more complete picture of the soldier can be represented there.

One change that some people will note that I am including the images of the Circumstances of Casualty records for any soldier that was killed in action or overseas, and where appropriate, I update the information in the “Cause of Death” section to reflect that what is contained on the card. As you can see for Private Frank Higgins, 675969, the card gives much more information then the default, “Died in War, unknown cause” and reflect the real experience of the soldier.

Further, I must state that I am trying to indicate sources, where possible, of any information found online. In some cases the sources for a lot of the individual soldiers’ pictures come from the Canadian Virtual War Memorial and if there is no source information (such as a watermark on the photograph) I do try to include any text that was attached to the photograph indicating the originating source.

Special mention MUST be made to Marika Pirie (Twitter Account) who unfailingly amazes me with the scope of hard, drudging, but I am sure, ultimately satisfying research. I know that my efforts, and thus my blog, would not be what it is with Marika’s and other researchers efforts.

As always, please comment, recommend, suggest, point me in directions.