Talk:Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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I am researching the death of my maternal grand-uncle, Thomas Gray of Lerwick, Shetland Islands, who was Chief Engineer aboard the Curaca which sank as a result of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Although he was a British merchant seaman, his name does not appear in the Commonwealth Graves & Memorial records. Furthermore, I discovered that the records of British merchantmen from 1914-1917 were "destroyed" for some unknown reason, so I have no way of getting any other documentation on him. I have to assume that his body was never found because his "fatality" number on the list in the Halifax Explosion Remembrance Book * is 1534, indicating that his loss was accounted for well after the explosion. Fortunately, ships' lists supplied the names of crews, otherwise my grand-uncle's death might never have been recorded anywhere. I have no memory of a stone to him in our home-town cemetery in Shetland, Scotland, but I will be trying to find out if he is listed among the war dead there.
According to the web-site of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, "[due} to the efforts of a grandson of one of the victims and a local historian, the names of the victims were added to the ship's monument located at Halifax's Fairview Cemetery in 2001." ^
I would be very interested in finding and thanking the people who were responsible for honoring the names of those non-military men from all over the world who died on that awful day. If I ever get to the east coast, the Fairview Cemetery will be at the top of my list of places to visit. I have the gold pocket-watch my grand-uncle bought for my grandmother on her engagement in 1913, so even if his body was never found, a piece of him is here on Canadian soil.
Peggy Young, Edmonton
