School project brings soldiers’ stories to life

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This article was published 18/05/2010 (5976 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Does anyone in your family remember an ancestor named John William Hardy?

Enlisted in the 44th Battalion in Winnipeg in 1914, survived the battle of Vimy Ridge, survived flu in the trenches, discharged in Toronto June 18, 1919.

And then disappeared from history’s eye.

Lexi Gowriluk would like to give John William Hardy a place in Canadian history. The Grade 11 student at J.H. Bruns Collegiate is painstakingly researching Hardy’s service record during the First World War.

He’s one of 23 students in English and history teacher Marlene Schellenberg’s class who’ve each been assigned one Winnipeg soldier to transform from a name in dusty old military records in Library and Archives Canada into a human being who lived and laughed and was loved, and went off to war.

"He survived — some of them did, and some of them didn’t," lamented Schellenberg.

Working through www.collectionscanada.ca, Schellenberg has enlisted her students for the Lest We Forget project started by teacher Blake Seward of Smiths Falls, Ont. The project’s goal is ambitious — creating a biography of every Canadian who served in two world wars.

"I focused on the 44th Battalion — it was at Vimy," said Schellenberg, who then selected soldiers who enlisted in Winnipeg. "Most of them were living here. Many of them were born in Britain — one would guess they’d have been very loyal to Britain."

Which is how John William Hardy and Lexi Gowriluk connected across 96 years.

Hardy was no lad; he was 35 when he enlisted on Dec. 22, 1914, said Gowriluk. He was a private, his next of kin was his sister Annie Hardy in Blackpool, England, and Hardy was a widower.

"He was a cook. I’m not sure he saw any combat," said Gowriluk, though he pointed out that the enormous military records that Ottawa collected on each soldier can be exceedingly hard to read. They’re on forms, but individuals’ information was handwritten.

"It’s hard to make out the cursive," said Gowriluk, who says Hardy was in the Canadian Army Service Corps at Vimy Ridge.

Hardy appears to have been a railway clerk before the war, he said. Library and Archives Canada has unbelievable numbers of old documents on-line, through which Gowriluk and his classmates are poring diligently. "It seems an unnecessary amount of paperwork — it was useless after the war," he said.

"He’s a short guy with glasses, five-foot-four," said Gowriluk, reading from Hardy’s personnel file. "I thought of Radar O’Reilly from MASH.

"In his medical record, he didn’t appear to get injured. He got influenza."

One mystery Gowriluk has spotted — the army said Hardy was 41 when he got influenza at the front in 1918, and 40 when he was discharged in Toronto in June of 1919.

Schellenberg said she plans to get access to Winnipeg Free Press online archives so students can try to find out what happened to the men who came home after 1918. And she would be delighted if descendants had family photos of these men.