By Mark Gillies
November 11, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
For several of the men who boarded those trains at Freeman Station bound for Toronto and then on to Montreal where they boarded ships to head for England we don’t know very much.
The Militia would issue Death Certificates to families. In this photograph the certificate issued to the Graham family is shown along with two medals he earned.
Sgt Thomas Graham was Killed in Action on the 27th day of September. We have nothing to tell us where he was killed or where his remains were put to rest.
There is a photograph and a Death Certificate with pictures of his medals.
Rev. Edwin Howard Stephenson, a single clergyman who died of measles in Russia. We don’t know how got there but we do know his remains are in a cemetery along with those of other Canadians.
We know much more about Rev. Edwin Howard Stephenson who served in the Medical Corps and contracted measles which proved fatal.
He is buried in the Churkin Russian Naval Cemetery, Vladivostok, Siberia, Russia, Row E, Grave 2. See photograph below.
We don’t know how he got to Russia but we do know that there is a small section of the cemetery with other Canadian graves.
He was a single clergyman. His Mother, who lived in Burlington is given as his next of kin.
The Churkin Russian Naval Cemetery, Vladivostok, Siberia, Russia contains the remains of a number of Canadians. Their markers can be seen on the left and right hand side just inside the disheveled gate.
War changes the lives of many. My grandfather’s name was Frank Wesley Gillies.
He went with the 91st Highlanders to march in the parade in London, England for the coronation of King George V in 1911. After returning from England, he returned to the farm, but when war broke out, he signed up for WW 1 duty and was sent overseas. He was a military ambulance driver on the front lines in Belgium and France. He was assigned to drive the ambulance, because not many men knew how to drive a motorized vehicle back then. Frank was a farm boy from Stoney Creek, and they had those large steam driven tractors on the farm.
That’s where he learned how to drive, even before driver’s licences were invented. While in combat where poisonous gas was involved, he unselfishly gave up his gas mask for a wounded soldier who lost his in combat, and he was trying to safely evacuate him in his ambulance.
The gas drifted their way and eventually caught up to him as they could not outrun it, and he breathed it in, thus beginning the end of his young life. The gas basically started to burn his lungs from the inside, and he was taken out of the combat zone and transported to a local hospital for treatment.
There was not much they could do. He never recovered completely as the gas continued to erode his lungs, and finally Frank was sent back to Canada to die. In Canada he was sent to a military hospital for more treatment in London, Ontario,
Arthur Groves has printers ink in his blood and served his apprenticeship at the original Burlington Gazette which had its office on Brant Street where the Rude Native restaurant is now located.
He later worked at newspapers in Dundas and Orillia and had family in the Dundas community.
The Death details for Charles Baker tell us very little.
Chester Baker was Killed in Action in France on September 30, 1918 and was buried in the British Cemetery.
Edward Hunt’s grave marker is in the British Cemetery in France.
Edward Hunt was Killed in Action at Tilley France and was buried at the Canadian Cemetery in France.
Eric Graham Rowley died in an aircraft 
accident when the plane he was flying plunged 15,000 feet and crashed. Rowley was killed instantly. All we have is a news clipping and his name on the cenotaph in Burlington to remember him by.
