Chatham Man Remembered at Osgoode Hall
Family Search: When Lieutenant Matthew Maurice Wilson was born on 21 December 1896, in Chatham, Kent, Ontario, Canada, his father, Mathew Wilson KC, was 42 and his mother, Anna Marsden Atkinson, was 37. He lived in Ontario, Canada in 1896 and Kent, Ontario, Canada in 1911. He registered for military service in 1917. In 1917, at the age of 21, his occupation is listed as law student in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He died on 10 October 1918, in Ficheux, Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, at the age of 21, and was buried in Bucquoy, Pas-de-Calais, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France.
Source: Law students killed in WWI to be called to bar: For the centenary of WWI, the Law Society of Upper Canada is giving honorary calls to the bar to the 60 Ontario law students killed in 1914-1918.
Excerpt
Take law student Matthew Maurice “Sonny” Wilson. After he died in France, his mother supposedly threw his revolver into the Thames River in Chatham, Ont., so it “could never kill again.”
The truth was less romantic, as great-nephew Fred Hall relates. The gun had been taken to a gunsmith so it would never discharge again, and it was later destroyed by the police. When Hall explained this to his aunt, she became very upset — she had believed the bridge story her entire life.
“They twisted things to suit themselves or to make themselves feel comfortable with the story,” Fred Hall says. “They didn’t want to be open and honest about the past.”
History of the 18th Battalion CEF, "The Fighting Eighteenth" 
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