'I was speechless': War medals returned to Saskatoon woman after 36-year search

War medals return home WATCH: CTV’s Pat McKay has the story of one woman’s mission to find her great-grandfather’s lost war medals.

SASKATOON — Cheryl Forseille’s great-grandfather Albert Pettitt fought for Canada in the Great War, spending three years overseas before returning home.

He was awarded four medals from the Canadian military for his service, a 1914-1915 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal, and the Colonial Auxiliary Forces Long Service Medal. Medals which, until recently, were lost to the family.

“I never even really thought I would actually find the medals,” Forseille said. “When I got that call one day last year that the medals were found, I was speechless. And honestly, it's still hard to believe that they're home.”

Forseille said her search began in 1983, when she discovered a letter her great-grandfather had written to her grandfather, expressing how he wanted to keep the medals in the family.

“We had been going through a box of momentos and that's where I found the letter, and my heart just dropped,” she said, realizing the letter referenced medals which her grandmother sold three years earlier.

“Right then and there, I made a promise that I was going to search for these medals.”

Forseille said she visited flea markets, coin collectors, antique stores, and contacted the local Legion, but, the medals were nowhere to be found.

“Once the Internet came along, I put out postings on lost war medal sites, and they were there for over 20 years,” she said.

Medals purchased by collector in New Brunswick

In 2014, she discovered through a museum in Manitoba, her great-grandfather’s home province, that the medals had been sold through an auction house in London, England in 2004.

“I got a hold of a fellow, and he was really helpful, and he told me that the medals came back to Canada,” she said. “He told me he actually knew the fellow that bought the medals, and he was a dealer in Canada.”

That dealer, it turns out, had passed away, so Forseille once again hit a roadblock.

That is, until medal collector Darrell Zinck from Burton, N.B., noticed a post in an online medal forum in November 2019.

“Cheryl had made an appeal in a special section our forum has set up for looking for family medals, and I happened to see it. I saw her great-grandfather's name and it sort of caught my eye,” Zinck said, recalling that he purchased a set of medals that fit the description 14 years earlier.

“Obviously I had what she was looking for, it was very obvious to me right away.”

Zinck managed to track down Forseille’s phone number, and gave her a call.

“I asked her if she was sitting down and she said she was, and I told her who I was and what I had, and it's probably a good thing she was sitting down,” he said. “It was a good couple of minutes before either of us could talk, I think we were both very emotional.”

“36 years of looking for the medals, almost 40 years after they've been sold. There's just no words like, I was just, I started crying,” Forseille said.

The two worked out a deal to send the four medals back to Saskatchewan, and on Nov. 14, 2019, they were back in the possession of Albert Pettitt’s family.

“It was just the most special feeling,” Forseille said. “It was unreal. Searching that long, and then finally having them in my hands, was very special.”

Returning medals to the family, that's the kind of thing that makes the people I know in the medal-collecting community happy, Zinck said.

“I was proud to be a part of it, but the work is Cheryl's. I had the medals, but all I did was answer a request that she had been making over and over again, and didn't give up on it.”

Forseille said she now keeps the medals; a 1914-1915 Star, The British War Medal, The Victory Medal, and the Colonial Auxiliary Forces Long Service Medal, in a special case, and they’ll remain in the family.