52 Weeks – Week 45: Ghost Story

While this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge theme is “Ghosts”, I don’t really have any ghost stories. So this week’s post might be a bit of a stretch.

This week, on November 11, it is Remembrance Day in Canada and many other countries. In the US, it’s Veterans Day. We think of all those who gave their lives for their country. The fallen are much more than ghosts. They are the lost, who were robbed of their futures, many with no descendants to remember them. One of those fallen was Lee Anton, my maternal grandmother’s second cousin (also her first cousin once removed through a different ancestor).

Lee was a farm boy from a practically non-existent village in south-west Saskatchewan. That village, Rastadt, is no longer even a ghost town. All that remains of it is the cemetery and a one-room schoolhouse. Lee would have turned 100 this year. Instead, he died at 22, in the liberation of the Netherlands.

Lee was a Trooper of the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment (14th Canadian Hussars) R.C.A.C. Lee was killed in action on April 12, 1945, less than a month before V-E Day, in the northern part of the Dutch province of Drenthe, the day before the start of the Battle of Groningen. Along with many of Canada’s other fallen soldiers, Lee is memorialized in two very special ways.

One is through the Book of Remembrance for the Second World War. This is one of seven books that are normally housed in the Memorial Chamber at the top of the Peace Tower of the Centre Block at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. However, they are being temporarily displayed elsewhere while the Parliament Buildings undergo renovations. The books record the names of over 120,000 Canadians who lost their lives in various conflicts Canada has been a part of. Every morning, a page of each book is turned, so throughout the year every name can be seen. The books can be searched online. The result will include a link to an image of the page the person appears upon, as well as a link to a virtual memorial hosted by Veterans Affairs Canada.

Lee’s memory is also commemorated by a lake in northern Saskatchewan that is named after him, Anton Lake, which you can see on Google Maps. From 1947 to 1965, the province operated a “Geo-Memorial” program by which it named lakes and other geographic features after people from Saskatchewan who died in WWII. This project, as well as the stories of some of the veterans who were commemorated this way, is documented in the book, Their Names Live on: Remembering Saskatchewan’s Fallen in World War II.

Lee is interred at the Holten Canadian War Cemetery, located just outside of Holten, Overijssel, Netherlands.