A Church at War

This book offers a careful account of the 141 men who belonged to a particular church in a then-modest Ottawa neighbourhood and went to fight in the First World War. “Belief in God, country, and Empire was a powerful [motivation] not only for men to sign up, but for their families and church to support them,” writes Alan Bowker, a parishioner of MacKay United Church.

Bowker had often read the names of the fallen on the church’s “In Memoriam” brass plaque, and he decided to research their stories. In this book he focuses on the nineteen men who never returned; but his commitment to telling forgotten stories, and to showing how individual tragedies affected a close-knit community, make the book far more than just their stories.

A Church at War could never have been written without the digitized records that are available on the Internet. Bowker scoured not only printed sources but also online church records, Canadian Expeditionary Force service files, war diaries, citation records, newspaper obituaries, cemetery records, and — providing a “cornucopia” of information — Ancestry.ca for information.

He then worked the fragmentary scraps of information into a coherent narrative about a bunch of young men, most of whom had rowed, studied, or worshipped together, and who were fed into the maw of a vast war machine. This is local history at its best.