New Records from the Canadian Expeditionary Force! – Fold3 – August 28, 2020

I wasn’t familiar with the fact that Fold3 has a blog. I found out today it does. It’s part of the Ancestry.com family. That means I need to check the other Ancestry.com sites to see if they have blogs. As I was checking the Fold3 blog, I noticed this post – New Records from the Canadian Expeditionary Force!: https://blog.fold3.com/new-records-from-the-canadian-expeditionary-force/. To access most of Fold3, you need to have a Fold3 paid subscription. They do offer some sections free and often do temporary free access to other sections. Here’s a short glimpse of the article. I didn’t include photos or examples, but you can see those on the link above.

August 28, 2020 by Jenny Ashcraft | 20 Comments

The Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) was the force raised by Canada for service overseas during WWI. Some 620,000 Canadians who enlisted between 1914-1918 served in the CEF. Of those enlistees, about 424,000 went overseas. Most were volunteers, but when recruitment slowed, a conscription law went into effect in 1918. Our new Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1915-1919 collection contains nominal rolls, rosters, war diaries, yearbooks, and unit histories for the CEF. Before the war came to an end in November 1918, the CEF gained the respect of both friend and foe as an elite fighting force. There were more than 233,000 Canadian casualties during WWI, resulting in nearly 61,000 deaths.

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As part of the British Empire, Canada automatically entered WWI in August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany. Canada, however, had limited military forces and began accepting volunteer recruits to serve. The first Canadian division arrived in Europe in 1915 under the command of the British military. Additional battalions arrived as the war progressed. Soon Canada’s fighting forces evolved into a National Army.

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