Gone But Not Forgotten: Using Archival Research to Trace and Preserve the Legacies of Bishop’s Fighting Men During World War I

The authors’ undergraduate essay, drawing on information found in Bishop’s University student magazine “Mitre”, along with the Veterans Affairs Canada website, examines the role of Bishop’s students, faculty and alumni engaged in the experience of the First World War. (The Mitre is Canada’s oldest continuously published student publication.) Their work adds to the “Bishop’s University Remembers” database, a collection of the histories of students, faculty and alumni who died in service during the First and Second World Wars (https://buremembers.ubishops.ca/). In 1914, Bishop’s University numbered just fifty-four full time students and six faculty members. Eighteen enlisted in 1914 and the following year sixty-five students, faculty or alumni were serving overseas. The “Bishop’s University Remembers” database, the authors argue, is an instrumental tool in understanding and interpreting the legacies of Bishop’s men and women who directly contributed to Canada’s efforts during the First World War. This project, the authors maintain, effectively ensures that such contributions are not “erased from memory” and “forgotten as history moves further away from the war.”

Journal of Eastern Townships Studies / Revue d'études des Cantons-de-l'Est

No. 50

143-152

2022

en