CANADIAN  ROOTS UK

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Grace Fulford our amazing Canadian volunteer researcher who has worked tirelessly to help Canadian Roots UK reunite WW2 children with their Canadian roots has retired. With the help Grace has given over the past 6 years many WW2 children now have answers to questions that had been denied them for too long. So from all the clients that you have helped over the years and from Canadian Roots UK, a very big THANK YOU.

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Sadly I must inform you that Chris Vowles founder of Canadian Roots UK passed away peacefully on the 20th September 2014. 

However, I can assure you that his tireless work to help all those seeking answers to find their roots will continue

Gathering of hardy folks along the seafront this morning to remember the Canadian servicemen and women of WW1 & 2

11th of the 11th 2013

Worthing, West Sussex, England.

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 10th Nov 2013

Canadian Roots UK lay a wreath at Worthing War Memorial

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SAD LOSS OF LLOYD RAINS

In Memory Of Lloyd Victor Rains

Lloyd Victor Rains passed away peacefully on Good Friday, March 29th, 2013, at 12:20 pm, at the age of

88, residing in London, Ontario, Canada with wife Olga.

Lloyd was born in Desbarats, Ontario on March 20, 1925 and grew up on St. Joseph Island, Ontario.

He enrolled in the Canadian army at 17 and was a member of the PPCLI, the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, and served in the campaigns from Sicily through to the Liberation of Holland, where he met his wife to be at the end of the war, married in Haarlem, Holland on December 24, 1945. They later moved to Canada and raised a family in Hamilton, Ontario.

Lloyd ran a business called The Dutch Cleaners, and later repaired appliances and managed motels though the crowning work of his life with Olga was in a 30 year mission called Project Roots which reunited 4000 children of war with their Canadian fathers and families. A work which was recognized by leading media in Holland and Canada, including the CBC National News, The Fifth Estate, NCRV and many others.

Lloyd loved oil painting, cribbage and nature, and charmed his grandchildren with his good nature and creative style, staying close with them even into their adult years. He and Olga built a marriage that spanned 67 years.

Lloyd is survived by wife Olga, and three sons, Ralph, Ross and Roger and grandchildren Jennifer, Trevor, Scotia, Clea, Nila, Yorr, Bonnie, Michael, Julie and Sherrie and 14 great-grandchildren.

A private family memorial service will be held on Sunday, April 7th at the farm of Ben and Bonnie

Loveday of London, where loving ‘Husband/Dad/Grandpa/Opa’ will be remembered.

Lloyd’s final wishes were for his ashes to be spread at a later date in Holten Cemetery, Holland, by special permission of the Military Cemeteries Commission. This is the location of the remains of comrades who fell all around Lloyd, in 1945. His final wish was to be reunited with his brothers in arms.

Lloyd’s hope of heaven rested in a personal faith in Jesus introduced by his mother Jesse, fuelled in the foxholes of the 2nd World War and confirmed in his fifties. At his request there will be no public visitation, and in lieu of flowers, any memorial remembrances can be made in the form of a donation to

the Canadian Cancer Society at  http://convio.cancer.ca/site/TR?pxfid=289904&pg=fund&fr_id=1300

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Wreath placed at the Canadian flag pole Worthing 11/11/2012

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CANADIAN FLAG FLYING OVER WORTHING

TO REMEMBER THE CANADIANS WHO

LEFT THE WORTHING AREA TO TAKE PART

 IN THE DIEPPE RAID 19th AUG 1942

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British newspaper salutes Canada . . . this is a good read. It is funny how it took someone in England to put it into words......
Salute to a brave and modest nation - Kevin Myers , 'The Sunday Telegraph' LONDON :

Until the deaths of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan , probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops are deployed in the region.

And as always, Canada will bury its dead, just as the rest of the world, as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.. It seems that Canada 's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored.

Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States , and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.

For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet it's purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada 's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, it's unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the 'British.'

The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone.

Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world. The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time.

Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter, Mike Weir and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British.

It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1% of the world's population has provided 10% of the world's peacekeeping forces.
Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia .

Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia , in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan ?

Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac , Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This past year more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.

Lest we forget.

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www.family-tree.co.uk                                                                                        October 2009

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30th Aug 2009

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Copy of article on Dick Eastman's Genealogy site and Newsletter

http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/07/canadian-war-children-of-world-war-two.html