Meet the volunteers who help tell the story of Canada’s war dead

On Nov. 11, 2022, delegates from more than 190 countries were gathered on the shores of the Red Sea for COP27 — the Conference of the Parties — a global summit on climate change. One of those there was Lisa Holmes, chief of staff to the mayor of Edmonton.

“I was in Egypt. I was in Sharm el Sheikh, but I told the mayor, ‘I’m going to have to do the project. I know we’re at COP, but this afternoon I’m going to be doing the project.’”

The project? The Ottawa Citizen’s annual We Are the Dead story, where reporters and editors at the paper set to work telling the story of one name from a list of Canada’s war dead, published every hour for the past 13 years from the paper’s @WeAreTheDead automated account on the social-media platform X.

Holmes, a history buff and amateur genealogist, is one of the many readers who help with the research.

On Remembrance Day 2022, at 6:11 p.m. Egyptian time, the account posted the name of Flying Officer Earl Henry Erickson, killed Sept. 22, 1943.

And with that crowd-sourced volunteers like Holmes were off and running.

“With the time change and everything, it was very hard that year. But it is one of the days I look forward to all year,” Holmes said in an interview from her office at Edmonton City Hall. “I talk about We Are the Dead a lot with my team and with my family. Everyone knows not to bother me on that day.”

That year, with the help of Holmes and other researchers, we learned that Erickson was the pilot of a Halifax bomber, JB850, that disappeared without a trace during a 700-plane raid on the German city of Hannover.

We learned he was born on St. Joseph’s Island, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on April Fools Day 1920. That his mother died when he was five. That he was raised by relatives, who had a son close to his age.

We learned that he worked as a bank teller before the war, that he had fair hair and blue eyes and that his commanding officer described him as a “keen and efficient pilot.”

And we tracked down Erickson’s nephew, Richard Sand, a 74-year-old Presbyterian minister living in Sechelt, B.C., who recalled how his mother kept Earl Erickson’s medals, pictures and official correspondence, including a letter of condolence from Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, in a small red box, that he inherited when she died.

Sand, whose middle name is Earl, like his uncle, said that he and his two siblings were proud of Earl Erickson’s service.

“He’s kind of a hero to us in our family,” Sand told the Citizen. “The three of us are now the custodians of his memory, but afterwards, when we’re gone, I’m not sure who will be responsible for remembering him.”

Finding those details would be impossible without the help of readers. Indeed, that was one of the goals of the We Are the Dead project when it was conceived by former Citizen reporter Glen McGregor in 2011. He wanted to harness the power of Twitter, as X was then known, to engage readers to help tell the story.

Holmes credits her interest in genealogy to her grandmother.

“I started when I was 12,” she said. “I started with my grandma. She was telling me stories and I started doing some research and documenting our family’s history.”

As her expertise grew, she began researching other people’s families for them. She was the lead researcher on a project to tell the life story of Izena Ross, Edmonton’s first female councillor.

“Once you figure out how to do it, and invest in the tools, it gets easier. I spend a lot of money each year on subscriptions. A normal person isn’t going to invest a lot of money for just one day a year.”

Holmes, a regular reader of The Citizen because of her job in politics, saw a We Are the Dead story a few years ago and slowly got hooked.

“I think I helped out a little bit in the first few years. But then I really got into it — I mean, I dedicated my day to it starting in 2020.”

While the paper researches one name each year, the one that’s posted at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day, Holmes does her own research on all the names that come up on Nov. 11.

Kori Maleski, a geographer who specializes in mapping software, has been a We Are the Dead helper since the beginning. The amateur genealogist learned of the project as a follower of McGregor’s Twitter account.

Like Holmes, Maleski’s interest grew out of his research into his own family history, which before his father’s time was just a blank page.

“My dad never met his grandfather,” Maleski said in an interview from Calgary. “He was a Polish immigrant and he didn’t know where he came from. We always asked, ‘Are we Polish? Are we Ukrainian?’ His grandfather never left any records.”

What they did have was a handwritten note that named the town where the grandfather came from, a village in the fluid, ever-shifting “borderlands” between Poland and Ukraine. Maleski began to painstakingly construct his own census of the region.

“You go to the old countries, and everyone names their kids the same,” he said. “I had to reconstruct the entire parish, all the family trees.”

Eventually, he developed a database of thousands of names. It took 10 years. Then he did the same for his mother, whose family came from Scotland.

“I got really good at finding people. So when Glen started We Are the Dead I thought, ‘I can do this! I can find people.’

“I have a methodology, which is basically typing all the records into a spreadsheet and then I can see when all the families came over.”

The work of amateur genealogists is crucial when tracking the names of First World War soldiers in particular. Many were newly arrived immigrants from the U.K. when they enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and sailed back across the Atlantic. They died in their teens and early 20s, leaving no children to carry on their family name — or their memory.

“Immigrants follow a pattern and you can actually see it in the spreadsheets,” Maleski said. “The Scots, for example, there are specific areas of Quebec and Ontario where they immigrated because they all went together on the same ships. So there are specific patterns.

“When we’re doing We Are the Dead and a name comes off the list at 11:11, first you look at the last name and then look at whether it’s from World War I or World War II. The last name determines what pattern you’re looking for, which areas they went to,” he said.

“For me, I just find it fascinating, the history that comes out. When I’m trying to help I’m just looking at records. I’m posting as much information as I can find as fast as I can find it. I’m not putting the history together. That’s what you guys get to do. The story you guys come up with is just remarkable.”

For Holmes, researching and reading about the sacrifice of Canada’s war dead makes her think of her own sons, aged 17 and 20.

“As we’ve gone though this and telling their stories, you realize, ‘They’re all so young,’” she said. “I just couldn’t imagine it as a mom, having to go through that. It’s important, even more so, when you see their journeys and are be able to tell their stories.”

In 2020, she visited the Vimy Memorial in France, running her fingers over the names carved into the stone of some of the soldiers she researched for We Are the Dead and on her own.

“I’ve loved it,” she says “It’s ignited a real passion for trying to tell these stories and really recognizing that so many of our Canadian military have died in service of their country and we don’t know anything about them at all. It’s sad.”

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