Randy Evans Once Angus Garrod had completed his two-year stint with the British Royal Navy he packed his trunk, said goodbye to his father in England, and emigrated to Sarnia. By 1914, the twenty-six year old bachelor was living at 122 Mary Street and had a labourer’s job at Imperial [...]
Tom Slater & Tom St. Amand In the 1920s, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission began removing the wooden crosses from the graves of fallen soldiers and replacing them with uniform markers of white stone. The Commission encouraged surviving families to compose personal epitaphs for loved ones laid to rest in [...]
George Mathewson About 70% of the more than 300 men from Sarnia who have died fighting for Canada lie in graves scattered around the globe. Their remains rest in 120 cemeteries in at least 17 countries, including such far-flung places as South Africa, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Iceland, Barbados and the [...]
Phil Egan Doug Dunn was a pal of mine from our first days of Grade One, and eight years later we attended high school together. The last Halloween in which I dressed up did not start off well. I stopped by Doug’s house on South Victoria Street, the two of [...]
Tom St. Amand and Tom Slater Doodie Graham kept her husband's wartime letters for the rest of her life. Soldiers overseas wrote thousands of letters home in WWII, but Bill's letters affected others decades after he wrote them. Doodie visited her husband’s grave in Holland shortly after [...]
Phil Egan Not every general during the Second World War was in uniform. Though they went to work each day in suits, J.R. Nicholson, E. Ralph Rowzee and Roger Hatch were as critical to the war effort as any officer in the Allied forces. And their battlefield was right here [...]
Remembrance Day services in Sarnia on Saturday, Nov. 11 will begin with the parade form-up at the Royal Canadian Legion, Branch, 62, at 10:20 a.m. The Hall is located at 286 Front St. For those involved in the parade, the March on the Colours will be followed by the laying [...]
Tom Slater and Tom St. Amand The First World War was a turning point in the evolution of human warfare. New and more lethal weapons emerged, including tanks, flamethrowers, poison gas and tracer bullets, which caused unimagined carnage, killing thousands of men from a distance in trenches [...]
Phil Egan The years 1915 and 1916 were a busy time as Canadian regiments and local military battalions boarded trains across the country to fight in the First World War. Their trains took them to troop transport ships in Halifax where they set sail for further training in England [...]
Tom Slater and Tom St. Amand For nearly a century now the cenotaph has been the centrepiece of Veterans’ Park on Wellington Street. But Sarnia might never have had the monument if not for a soldier's death and a mother's grief. On the morning of May 25, 1918, Private Leonard [...]
