If a WWI soldier once lived in your home, you might be getting a postcard

Some lucky Londoners may discover a special piece of First World War history in their mailboxes in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day.

Reproductions of more than 400 First World War postcards – 40 of which will be posted to homes in historic London neighbourhoods – will be mailed out to Canadian homes where soldiers once lived as part of a Western University history initiative aimed at connecting modern-day residents to their home’s past and spark interest in Canada’s involvement in the world wars. 

Military historian and author Jonathan Vance and his research assistants have dug into an archive of around 15,000 First World War postcards and will distribute reproductions of them in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day.

More than 650,000 Canadians served in the war fought from 1914 to 1918 and 66,000 lost their lives.

The postcards are part of the war, memory, and popular culture research collection, supported by Ley and Lois Smith. Its online portal is www.wartimecanada.ca.

Vance describes the postcards as his “obsession” and felt it was important to share the valued collection with others.

“I was trying to think of a way for other people to enjoy them, rather than just keeping them in the office,” he said.

From that sprung the idea of reprinting them and sending them out as a Remembrance Day project, he said.

Vance, who has longed to dive into the project for several years, said it came to fruition after he found himself with three summer researchers this year eager to take on the project.

He says he hopes the postcard project makes residents “mindful of the connection between the past and the present.

“The First World War was 100 years ago; it’s easy to think it’s not part of their world because it was so long ago but it was and is part of our world and always will be,” he said. “The fact that this soldier went off to war and the person who lives there now, didn’t, is just an act of the fate. It could have easily been reversed.”

The first of the postcards were sent out this week, Vance said.

For Bailey Ashton, one of three researchers working on the project, the exercise “was particularly important because it is easy for people to view history as fiction, or as old wives’ tales.”

“These were real people with real stories that have real consequences on our current Canadian society,” Ashton said.

During the war years, using postcards to communicate was “cheap and easy.”

“They were the text messages of the First World War,” Vance said. “They circulated in the millions; literally 1900 to 1920 was the heyday of the postcard.”

Vance says they have about 15,000 postcards in the collection and researchers spent last summer picking through them and looking for postcards with images “nice enough” to reproduce.

Then, the researchers investigated whether or not the residence where a soldier once lived still existed before researching the soldier.

“Then . . . everything had to be sized perfectly for postcard size,” Vance said. “We had to add our own text and block out the original things like the original stamp, to put it through the mail and get it nicely tidied up so Canada Post will accept it.”

Two different types of postcards are being mailed, he said.

Some are a portrait of a nurse or a soldier taken during the First World War and provide basic details about the soldier’s wartime experiences.

“We send that to the address they lived in when they volunteered or when they were called up,” Vance said.

While more labour intensive, the other postcards are more personal and are a reproduction of the actual postcard sent out with the original message.

“We still have a little bit of biographical information but we allow people to read the message they were sending back in 1914, ’15, ’16 and experience the news from overseas,” Vance said.

Both postcards provide information about the collection’s website, Vance’s email address and a QR code.

The timing of the project was chosen because Vance felt those receiving the postcards might have a better understanding of why it was sent if it was closer to Remembrance Day.

Friday was the launch of the Royal Canadian Legion’s 2023 national poppy campaign.

Poppy boxes will be available at thousands of locations across Canada.