On Nov. 1, volunteers are scheduled to set up about 170 lawn signs marking Sarnia homes to which a military member didn’t return because they died serving overseas during wartime.
Another about 80 signs for fallen service members from addresses where homes are no longer located will be set up in Centennial Park, not far from Branch 62 of the Royal Canadian Legion on Front Street, as a replica of war cemeteries overseas.
Signs also will go up at five streets in Sarnia named for fallen military members.
The signs, which include the military member’s name, photo and a QR code link to a website (sarniaswarfallenwheretheycalledhome.ca) for the Sarnia’s War Fallen: Where They Called Home project, will remain in place until Nov. 12.
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It’s a community project initiated by Sarnia’s Doug Woods, along with Tom Slater and Tom St. Amand with the War Remembrance Project which has published several volumes of biographies and stories of Sarnia’s war dead, from the Boar War to modern conflicts.
Woods said he was visiting his son, singer-songwriter Donovan Woods, in Toronto a year ago when he saw printed sheets attached to a utility pole with information about a fallen military member who once lived at the address.
Later, Woods showed a cellphone photo of the sheet to St. Amand at a curling session back in Sarnia and then Slater, a retired high school teacher who initiated the War Remembrance project a decade ago, came on board.
The Sarnia effort expanded beyond laminated information sheets Woods first imagined to include colored lawn signs and a webpage with biographies and a map created by Andrew Douglas with the IT department at city hall, as well as collecting nearly $10,000 in donations to cover the costs.
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“More power to the Toms for convincing me” to expand the idea into something “the entire community. . . can be proud of,” Woods said.
It “began with a casual conversation that became a community project,” St. Amand said.
“We’re all well aware of conflicts that are going on in the world right now,” Woods said.
Showing the impact of sacrifices made in the past can help create awareness of the need to prevent wars from happening, he said. “We don’t ever want to lose our sons the way we did” in the past, Woods said.
Slater said he hopes the project will help ensure the city’s fallen, and their families who also sacrificed, are remembered, and he would like to see teachers in city schools make use of the material.
“What better way to teach students about Remembrance Day and sacrifice than to talk about this kid who went to this local high school and worked at the shop down the street, played on the football team,” and went to war and never returned, Slater said.
Families of those being remembered, and homeowners where the signs will go up on boulevards, have been supportive of the project, Slater said. City council also gave its blessing.
About 30 volunteers will set up the signs Nov. 1 and they will be collected Nov. 12 to be stored so the memorial can be repeated in future years, Woods said.
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