Locating the final resting spot of someone who served in one of the World Wars is like finding a needle in a haystack. With over 1.7 million burials, 23,000 cemeteries and 153 countries, those can be some tough numbers to crunch. Yet such figures do not seem to faze local Navy veteran Gord Brown – it’s easy he says, if you know where to look.
Since his retirement from the Canadian Forces – he was stationed in Qatar during the Gulf War – Brown has travelled through Europe locating Wellington County’s fallen. He has found some 200 resting spots and continues to be approached by curious family members from across the region seeking burial information about their ancestors.
Before beginning a search, Brown sends the name of the deceased to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), which searches its database and provides him with the soldier’s age, rank, unit, date of death, cemetery location and grave marker number. This makes things relatively easy.
“There are around 1,000 cemeteries just in southern Belgium and northern France and each can have 25 [burials] all the way up to the thousands,” he remarks. “You don’t want to go to Europe to find a grave without asking somebody from the CWGC first.”
Brown says because the landscape has changed so drastically in the last century, many of the smaller cemeteries have been swallowed up by urban centres and can be difficult to find.
“A lot of the places that were open ground and countryside have now been built up,” he explains. “I had one cemetery in Belgium … I went over a number of times and I just haven’t been able to find it.”
The physicality of the grave markers themselves can also contain a lot of information, he says. One can usually narrow down which country it is just by looking at it.
Canadian and British stones are slate in colour with rounded edges – Canadian tablets are inscribed with a maple leaf, or a Victoria Cross if it was awarded. French and German markers take the shape of a cross and “the American ones are very white and in the form of a cross,” says Brown. “And if they happened to be Jewish there would be a Star of David.”
The cemeteries themselves are also unique. In the Wimereux cemetery located in northern France, the headstones lay flat in the ground due to heavy coastal winds and the sandy nature of the soil. In 1914, this site was an important hospital centre and contains 220 Canadians, including Lieutenant John McCrae of Guelph.
The Harrogate Cemetery in North Yorkshire England contains around five soldiers from Wellington County, Brown has discovered – from Arthur, Elora, Fergus and Kenilworth. Sometimes, he says he goes to find a site for someone and ends up uncovering previously unknown family history in the process.
“Last year I went over and I found that a family had changed the spelling of their name and the family never knew it.”
Brown says there are a number of factors that could determine where a solider would be buried.
Due to mass casualties and dangerous conditions, many burials were often hurried and done right on the battlefield while others were transported to a designated site. This, he says, depended on protocol established by the country troops were serving.
“For the Canadians and the British, they would be buried where they fell in action as close as possible. The Germans and the Americans moved people with them and buried them later,” he says. “So some of the German and American cemeteries have [40,000 to 50,000 people] in them … and there are only around five cemeteries, whereas the British have over 1,000.”
Brown says in the case of battlefield burials, a special team of troops would return later to identify bodies and make a note of their location.
“A lot of people, especially in the middle part of France during the Battle of the Somme, would be buried in one spot and later all the graves would be dug up and amalgamated into a major cemetery.”
The process was aided by the dog tag identification all soldiers were given when heading to the front. However many times the necklaces were lost in battle and bodies were found in a condition that made recognition impossible – meaning thousands of soldiers went unidentified.
“Often the bodies were badly destroyed and the tags would be blown away. Sometimes they could tell it was a Canadian from the buttons or badges that were on the uniform, but quite often they couldn’t even do that, so it’s not uncommon to find markers that just read, ‘a soldier of the Great War.’”
Other times, quick burials and limited space meant two or three soldiers share one plot.
“In some areas where the fighting was very fierce, you wind up with one, two and sometimes three names on a stone,” he says.
For those whose remains were never recovered, Brown says their names can be found on various memorials such as the monument at Vimy Ridge in France, which contains the names of 11,285 missing Canadian soldiers.
Although Brown has visited some 500 European burial sites in his travels, he says the Tyne Cot cemetery in Belgium has had the most profound impact on him. He says the feeling of standing on the top of the hill and seeing acre upon acre of markers is indescribable.
“People have no concept of seeing a cemetery with 10,000 crosses in it. I’m sure [everyone] has been to a cemetery before but you’ve never seen cemeteries like these, it’s just incomprehensible,” he says. “And those people probably died within a two- or three-day period.”
Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world with 11,956 servicemen commemorated – 8,369 of which are unidentified. A memorial on the site further recognizes some 35,000 people whose remains were never recovered.
Brown says he would really like to see grave sites in Asia and the Middle East because many people forget about them.
“They’re hard to get to because there’s a lot of wars going on in the Middle East,” he says. “All of those Middle Eastern countries have massive war graves but unfortunately they’re not in very good shape right now because they’re in the middle of warfare and being destroyed.”
Despite the Great War reaching its centenary this year, Brown says he doesn’t think attention to acts of remembrance will fade away as schools continue to attend the program put on by the Wellington County Museum & Archives each November.
“The families are still eager and we normally have about eight schools involved each year and I think they’re just amazed [by what they see],” he says.
