How social media became an unlikely memorial for Canadian soldiers

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Every hour for the past 13 years, a social media account created by the Ottawa Citizen has posted the name of one Canadian soldier, sailor or aviator who lost his or her life in military service. @WeAreTheDead has steadily recited the names of Canadian Forces members killed through more than 120 years, from the Boer War, through the carnage of the First and Second World Wars, to Korea, and more recently, in the lengthy conflict in Afghanistan.

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The online memorial is drawn from a list of 118,000 names in a database maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The grim catalogue includes their ranks, regiments, dates of death, and sometimes their ages and burial sites. But beyond this “tombstone data,” the records gave little detail about their stories of war, where they came from, how they died, or the friends and family left to remember them.

When I received an electronic copy of the database in 2011 through an access to information request, I wondered if there was a way to share it with a wider audience through social media, and maybe learn more about the names it contains.

With Remembrance Day approaching, I pitched the project to then-Ottawa Citizen editor Andrew Potter. He liked the idea of a memorial that would sustain itself online. As he put it, remembrance should not be confined to just one day in November. It should be an ongoing, daily act.

I wrote a small computer program – a “bot” – that would select a single name from the massive database at random and post it to Twitter every hour of every day. Potter suggested naming the project after a line in John McRae’s “In Flanders Field.”

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We also committed to writing a profile of the Forces member whose name the bot randomly selected and tweeted 11:11 a.m., on November 11th and publishing it in the next day’s Ottawa Citizen. This would be a journalistic leap of faith, committing in advance to tell the story behind a name we didn’t know until it was tweeted.

On the first morning the bot went live, it posted the name of Leading Aircraftman Melvin Chancy Simpson, who died in July 1944, a few weeks after D-Day.

As we researched his life, we learned that Simpson did not die fighting in the skies over Europe, as others in the Royal Canadian Air Force were doing that month. He succumbed to stomach cancer in a hospital in Nova Scotia. A sad death for a 24-year-old, but not what we had expected when we conceived the idea of profiling a Canadian war hero.

Each year on Nov. 11th, we profiled another name that popped up at 11:11. We learned about a Saskatchewan farmer who perished at Vimy Ridge, a bricklayer from Winnipeg lost in the muddy carnage of Ypres, and a dashing pilot from Edmonton who crashed over the English Channel, leaving behind an unborn daughter he never met.

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To help develop each profile, we “crowdsourced” on Twitter and enlisted researchers, amateur genealogists and military history buffs in our search for information about these lives cut too short. They found enlistment papers, war diaries and census records that filled in the biographical blanks about our subjects.

When I left the Citizen in 2016, reporters Andrew Duffy, Blair Crawford, David Reevely and city editor Drake Fenton took over the annual We Are The Dead profile. They elevated it into a showcase of investigative journalism and historical research, tracking down relatives and digging up photographs of the dead.

When the project launched, it was uncertain if Twitter would continue to operate for the 13 years it would take to tweet out the entire list of war dead. There were some technical glitches along the way that sometimes interrupted the project. When Twitter became X, rule changes curbed the use of bots and temporarily knocked @WeAreTheDead offline several times in the past two years. It will now take until next October to complete the online role call.

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Not all those profiled were combat heroes of the conventional kind. Some died from illness, some by accident, far from the front lines.

Most were everyday Canadians who interrupted their lives and signed up to defend their country. They did what we asked them to do, and lost their lives because of it, leaving behind brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, wives and girlfriends, and sons and daughters. Some are still mourned by friends and family, others have been forgotten in the decades since their deaths. But all were heroic in their own ways.

Glen McGregor is a former Ottawa Citizen reporter who now covers Parliament Hill for CityNews.

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