The Lest We Forget Project

At a chilly Remembrance Day ceremony in Smiths Falls, Ontario in 1998, I stood at the town’s cenotaph and listened as the Honour Roll was read aloud. I was troubled that other than hearing the names of each soldier, I knew nothing of how, when and where they died; nor did I know anything about their lives before the wars, and the loved ones each soldier left behind. I then thought about my mother’s uncle Clarence – other than knowing that Clarence had fought and died in the Great War, I knew nothing about my relative.

After some inquiry, I learned that I could access Clarence Mainse’s service file through the Library and Archives Canada; what I learned was compelling: Clarence was a typical enlistment in the Great War; he was born and raised on a farm outside of Kingston, Ontario but had moved to Saskatchewan to work as a clerk for a grain elevator company. Clarence fought at Mt. Sorrel, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Hill 70. He was killed at the age of 26 by an artillery blast as his battalion entered the outskirts of the village of Passchendaele in November 1917. Fittingly, my uncle, Private Clarence Mainse is buried in a small cemetery surrounded by farmers’ fields in a village on the outskirts of Belgium.

Soldier biographies involve work with primary research documents and fulfills many of the Canadian History curriculum expectations. Armed with this knowledge, I copied the soldiers’ names from the Smiths Falls cenotaph, reserved a conference room at Library and Archives Canada and introduced my Grade 10 Canadian History class to in-depth evidence research. Students at Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute wrote the Great War chapter for their community. With this, the Lest We Forget project was born.

Over the last twenty plus years, hundreds of thousands of Great War and Second World War soldiers have been researched by students in schools large and small across Canada. Currently, the Lest We Forget project, hosted by Library and Archives Canada has nearly fifty million pages of primary evidence documentation to support schools and communities.

The Lest We Forget research work continues today through Heritage Canada to further explore the significant roles that Black Canadian soldiers, Nursing Sisters and Indigenous soldiers played in the world wars.

Blake Seward was born and raised in Smiths Falls, Ontario. He received his Honours B.A. degree from Trent University and his B.Ed. degree from Mount Allison University. He has a Masters Degree in Education from the University of New Brunswick. The Lest We Forget program has been recognized internationally.