A Chemainus woman expects to learn soon if bones found on a battlefield in France from the First World War belongs to her long lost great uncle.
Marlie Kelsey said she has been contacted by the federal Casualty Identification Program, an arm of the Canadian Department of National Defence which works to identify newly found skeletal remains of Canadian service members from major wars around the world, and told that the bones of a Canadian soldier had been uncovered in a mass grave near where the Battle of Hill 70, close to the City of Lens, took place in August, 2017.
She said a forensic analysis of the bones narrowed down the identification of the remains to five soldiers, with one of them being Kelsey’s great uncle Private Duncan McLaren, from Montreal, who was known to have been among 25 Canadian soldiers who were killed in action on the first day of the battle on Aug. 15, 1917, and were buried in a mass grave which was marked with a memorial at the time, but had disappeared long ago.
McLaren, who was just 21 when he died, was a member of the 13th Battalion of the Royal Highlanders of Canada which was sent to France to fight with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War.
His battalion was one of several involved in an attack on Hill 70 as part of the Canadian Corps that followed the Corps' involvement in the capture of Vimy Ridge, which took place during the Battle of Arras in April, 2017.
“It was determined that my great uncle was a potential candidate because the remains are of the same height and age range, so they reached out to my family, and the families of the four other possible candidates, to provide DNA samples to help identify the identity of the bones,” Kelsey said.
A letter sent to Kelsey from Alexandra McKinnon, a research historian with the Casualty Identification Program, said she is looking for a paternal-line relative of Kelsey's great uncle to provide a cheek swab to make a comparison with the bones.
“Given Private McLaren died unmarried, my search for a DNA donor has focused on his brothers, Alexander and Henry,” McKinnon said. “Any of their male paternal-line descendants would be excellent candidates for a DNA comparison. Y- chromosone Short-Tandem Repeat DNA is passed from fathers to sons, which means a paternal-line male relative can provide a point of comparison for a DNA sample taken from recovered remains. I’m not sure if either Alexander or Henry has living sons or even paternal grandsons, but I wanted to reach out to you because they appear in your ‘Marlie Jean McLaren Family Tree’.”
Kelsey said her great uncle has a number of paternal cousins in eastern Canada and the U.S. that she has contacted, and one in Georgia, who is also coincidentally called Duncan McLaren, recently did a cheek swab and sent it to the Casualty Identification Program for comparison.
“The whole family is so excited that the bones might be identified as my great uncle’s,” she said. “If it’s him, he’ll be reburied and given a proper headstone at Vimy Ridge in France. I intend to fly there for his reburying if the bones turn out to belong to my great uncle. He was just 21 when he died. He was like all the other soldiers who died fighting for his country.”
The Canadian National Vimy Memorial is a war memorial site in France dedicated to the memory of Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the First World War.
It also serves as the place of commemoration for Canadian soldiers of the First World War killed or presumed dead in France who have no known grave.
Canada has more than 27,000 war dead with no known grave and, to this day, human remains continue to be discovered on former battlefields.
