A website to remember Powell River’s 55 WWII fallen soldiers is being created and its curator is looking for help from friends and families of the men.
Grant Workman, a member of Brooks Secondary School’s Class of 1954, returned to Powell River last summer for a high school reunion and while visiting Townsite he and his wife took a look at the cenotaph.
“It’s one thing to look at a cenotaph and see those names, but they don’t really mean a lot,” said Workman. “I think our generation will be the last to remember these men.”
After returning home to West Kelowna he started thinking about a way to honour the men who did not return home from WWII.
“This is something I should have done 50 years ago,” he said.
Workman did not serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force, but as a teen he was a member of the 22 Red Knight Squad Air Cadet Corps based out of the Timberlane barracks. He lived in Powell River from 1947 to 1959. His father was a retired serviceman and worked as a millwright in Powell River.
About four years ago he was sent a link for the Powell River Historical Museum and Archives’s website. While he was surfing around the site he came across a page of listings of Powell River servicemen.
“The bulk came back thankfully, but there were those 55 who didn’t,” he said.
At first he had the idea of creating what he called “a wall of heroes,” which would include a framed, weatherproof picture of each of the 55 men. He decided to alter the idea after he realized the cost and that “it wouldn’t be much better than just having names on a cenotaph.”
That’s when he decided to create a website to honour the men.
Workman, who had experience coding web pages, decided that he could create a page with more information than just the men’s names and locations of their graves.
“I’d like to get more personal details into the entries,” he said. “The information that only family of the men would have.”
He started the project with only 11 photos available from the museum and soon found another five. His searching has taken him to websites like Find A Grave, which helps locate where servicemen are buried around the world, and records from branches of the Canadian military.
According to Workman, the majority of the fallen soldiers from Powell River were enlisted in the air force which, he said, kept more informative records than the other military branches.
“It’s the army and navy men whose information is really sketchy,” he said.
A challenge finding information about those men is that often Workman only has the man’s first initial and the family name.
“A lot of those are pretty common names,” he said. “I don’t want to put up anything that isn’t accurate in terms of dates and names.”
Readers can visit Workman’s digital memorial page. If families and friends of the men would like to submit a photo or some details about their loved one they can contact the curator at yumasnowbirds@shaw.ca.
