I mentioned in my last post that the archivist I had contacted at the Colchester Historeum e-mailed me information from my grandmother Velma Moore’s high school yearbook that I didn’t know, including scans of the relevant pages. Here is what she sent me:

This was my first e-mail inquiry to an archivist, and I was thrilled with the result!

I learned that Velma graduated at the top of her class and was awarded a bursary to help with her educational expenses when she entered Dalhousie University the following school year. In addition, I now have the title of her high school yearbook, as well as the names and faces for some of the teachers she would have had.

I’ve included the complete page of the last scan to provide some of the historical context for Velma’s high school years and also to call attention to the sacrifice of Raymond Fulton, who left high school at the end of Grade XI to fight in the Great War, where he lost his life due to illness. Velma would have been sensitive to reports of casualties, as her brother Fred (Fred Lawrence Moore, 1894-1971) was serving in the Army overseas at the time.¹

I recently learned from a blog I’ve been following (Janice Brown’s Cow Hampshire: New Hampshire’s History Blog) that a significant number of soldiers and nurses died of influenza and pneumonia while serving overseas in the First World War. For some reason, this has made a big impression on me, although I’m not quite sure why. War fatalities resulting from respiratory illness just seem like adding insult to injury–as if getting shot, gassed, or blown up weren’t bad enough.

¹Katharine Brown Gauffreau, “The Ancestry and Life of Velma Jane Moore Brown” (unpublished manuscript, December 2013), 25.