Family ‘blown away’ by impressive work linking Canadian soldier killed during First World War with unidentified grave

An investigation into a previously unidentified First World War grave in France has revealed it belongs to a Canadian. Beth MacDonnell reports.

The family of a Canadian soldier with no known grave for more than a century is impressed and thankful for the work by a team of historical researchers to identify their relative’s last resting place.

This week, the Department of National Defence (DND) and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) announced the identification of Capt. William Webster Wilson and his grave at Adanac Cemetery in France.

“I think we’ve all been really kind of blown away by what effort the Canadian Department of National Defence have gone to, first to identify who this unnamed soldier was, and then to track down my mother,” Siân Edmunds, a distant relative, told CTV News Toronto from Bristol, U.K.

Wilson was Edmunds’ great great grandmother’s nephew. She said her mother remembers relatives from Wilson’s generation.

Born in 1890, Wilson emigrated to Canada from Scotland and worked at the Bank of Montreal in Toronto and Lindsay, Ont., before enlisting in the military. He returned to Europe as a paymaster, eventually fighting and dying in battle as part of the Somme offensive in 1916. He was 25 years old.

For a variety of reasons, not all soldiers were identified when they were buried or when it came time to mark the headstone. There are still around 27,000 Canadian war dead who remain unidentified from the First and Second World Wars.

Wilson’s mystery began to unravel after the DND got a report about a missing captain from the 16th battalion buried in Adanac Cemetery in France.

For six months the team worked, creating a huge candidate list of missing men and whittling it down through documents—including an inquiry from Wilson’s brother in Australia who had moved there to do farming with their father. The team also searched through information about remains, war diaries and archives before matching Wilson with a specific unmarked grave.

“I’m just so proud that this is one of the many cases that the historian sleuthing does really amount to something very important,” said Renée Davis, research historian with the DND’s casualty identification program, from Ottawa on Tuesday.

“I think that doing this work we can bring their stories to a lot of families that don’t necessary know or remember them anymore, but in that way we keep their memories alive.”

“I have to say I’m very moved by it,” said Edmunds. “And then to have this sort of direct descendent who gave his life from halfway around the world. He was obviously a Scotsman but to set up a whole new life in Canada, and to put your life on the line like that... it’s just pretty phenomenal really.”

A headstone rededication ceremony is now being planned.

“As a family we’d like to say thank you to the Canadian Forces,” said Edmunds. “You think back and he was a real person, and it’s important that it’s acknowledged and I think they’ve done an amazing job bringing that to us all.”

Davis said knowing the family is able to learn about their relative now is emotional.

“It’s basically our job to figure out everything we possibly can about these missing men and to a certain extent they start to feel like family because you spend so much time understanding their stories and learning about them and learning about their death, and ultimately learning about the heartbreak that the family goes through over a century that they are missing,” Davis said.

“So, in many ways, you create these intense connections with these soldiers you’ve never met before.”