A gold name pin gifted to a little girl by a Canadian soldier before he shipped out to fight in the Second World War could be the missing link in tracing his descendants.
Audrey Greenhalgh was just eight years old when she lived across the street from a military barracks in Glace Bay, N.S. About 75 years ago she received a gift from a soldier named Johnny.
“He came up to me and he bent down and he pinned this pin onto my little torn dress, took both my little hands in his and said ‘kid, remember me’,” she told CTV Atlantic.
“It would be quite remarkable if he did return and perhaps told a daughter or a granddaughter or grandson ‘I gave a little girl a pin at one time when I was stationed in Glace Bay.’”
Greenhalgh kept her promise and has done all she can to keep Johnny’s memory alive by wearing the pin alongside her poppy every Remembrance Day.
And now with the advent of social media, she hopes to connect with his descendants.
If she could reunite the pin with one of Johnny’s relatives it would mean a promise well kept, she said.
“I’ve thought about him, I wondered if he came back,” Greenhalgh told CTV.
“I wondered why a young man would feel so saddened, that he would put his trust in a little girl to remember him. Did he not have someone else to remember him?”
This Remembrance Day, Greenhalgh will be thinking of Johnny and praying that he did come back.
A doctor at the barracks told her when she was young that the soldier was from somewhere out west.
While she never did see the soldier again, she has always kept the memory of her “pin pal” alive, writing poems and short stories about him, wondering about his fate.
With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Ryan MacDonald