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These are the stories of Kenora participants in the First World War.
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Archie Kenneth McKay was born on 27 April 1882 in Upper Clyde in the county of Shelburne in Nova Scotia. His father James Lewis McKay was from Upper Clyde, while his mother Elizabeth Barss Smith was from nearby Brookfield. The couple married in Brookfield on 29 September 1875. Children born to the family were Otis… Read More »
Sapper Robert Charles Thompson enlisted in April 1915 and died at the Somme about a year and a half later. His younger brothers William and Clifford also enlisted and they both survived the war. Robert was the oldest son of William Richmond Thompson Sr. and Elizabeth O’Hara. According to census records William Sr. and Elizabeth… Read More »
William Alexander Wilson was born on 16 December 1900 in Rat Portage (later renamed Kenora) in northwestern Ontario. His father William Alexander Wilson was from the St Catharine’s area in Ontario while it appears that his mother Lillian Hayzy (aka Hill) was from Poland. The couple married on 16 March 1904 in Winnipeg. Moving to… Read More »
Walter Baker was born on 08 December 1887 in Beaford, Torrington, Devon, England. His father Thomas Baker was an agricultural labourer who had married his mother Hannah Cudmore during the last quarter of 1883 in Torrington. According to the 1891 census Walter had an older sister Ellen and younger brother Thomas. His mother died during… Read More »
Captain Halsey James Pepper was commissioned as an officer in March 1916 and he served for three years in Canada, Great Britain and France. A few years after the war ended he moved to Los Angeles, California where he died by suicide in 1928. Halsey was born on 22 March 1867 in Wokingham, Berkshire, England…. Read More »
Joseph Hamel (Hamill) was the son of Anna Leclair/Leclerc and her first husband Thomas Pelletier. Anna and Thomas were married in 1899 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Joseph was born there on 5 July 1900, his birth registered as Joseph Anthony Stephen Pelletier. Thomas appears to have died by 1901 and Anna then married Henry Hamel…. Read More »
Horace Albert Olsen was born on 12 October 1897 in the Ullswater area in Muskoka, Ontario. His father Tobias Olsen, the son of Norwegian immigrants, was born in 1862 in Quebec while his mother Mary Ann McCaskill, the daughter of a Scottish immigrant and his Upper Canadian born wife, was born in 1861 in Glengarry,… Read More »
William Arthur Larman was born on 14 May 1892 in Hatfield, Hertfordshire in England. His father William was from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, while his mother Eliza Ann Parrott was from Hatfield, a community about 25 kilometres south of Hitchin. Over the years William SR was employed as a goods guard for the Great Northern Railway. At… Read More »
Sapper Arthur Charles Cripps enlisted with a railway unit in January 1917 and served in France and Belgium for two years. Arthur was the only son of Arthur Cripps (Sr.) and Maria Moore of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, England. His father had grown up in Gloucestershire and his mother was from Somerset. They were married in 1889… Read More »
