BARRHEAD-In preparation for Remembrance Day, Dunstable School Grade 4 to 6 students ensured that the Canadian Armed Forces veterans at Our Lady of Lourdes Cemetery near Lac La Nonne, were honoured with the placing of a poppy on or next to their grave marker.
The students knew which graves belonged to Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members in part due to the work of the Barrhead Royal Canadian Legion. Every year in early October, Legion members plant a Canadian flag at the gravesite of every veteran buried in Barrhead’s Field of Honour and at 26 other cemeteries in the County of Barrhead.
On Nov. 9, the students visited the cemetery as part of its contribution to No Stone Left Alone initiative was started by the No Stone Left Alone Memorial Foundation in 2011. Their mission is to educate Canadian students and honour the sacrifices made by fallen CAF members at home and abroad. Their eventual goal is to ensure that every veteran has a poppy placed on their grave marker. In its initial year, Canadian students placed 4,300 poppies, but by 2019 that number had grown to more than 63,000 at more than 130 sites.
School principal and Grade 5/6 teacher Tammy Tkachuk said that before the students visited, she went to the cemetery and selected the graves of two local veterans that the students could learn about.
Lt. William L Kelly served in the First World War as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Specifically, he was an engineer helping build railways. They learned about his service and the fact that he was active in the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
T, hrough some investigating, they learned that the 239th Battalion was recruited in the spring of 1916 and that they were seeking experienced railway men.
"We also learned that when they arrived in England in December of 1916, they were absorbed into the Canadian Railway Construction Corp and became the 3rd Battalion, Canadian Railway Troop," Tkachuk said via e-mail.
The students also learned that after the war, Kelly ran the store in Sion, near Nakamun Park.
The other veteran Tkachuk selected was Second World War veteran Sapper (combat engineer) Albert Lou Foley, who served with the Royal Canadian Engineers.
As a combat engineer, Foley's duties could have included breaching fortifications, demolitions, bridge building, laying or clearing minefields, and the preparation of field defences, as well as working on road and airfield construction and repair. Sappers were also trained to serve as infantry personnel in defensive and offensive operations. He died in February 1944 at 28. His family was from Belvedere.
"As a school, we talked about how he was only 28 when he died and the fact that his headstone just lists his mother, sister and brother, led us to believe that he did not have a chance to raise a family of his own," Tkachuk said.
Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com
