Stories of veterans from North Shore live on in new photo display

Their hat badge. Greg and Annie Perry spent the last few months researching veterans from PEI's North Shore. They both served in Afghanistan. Now they're honoring others. So our initiative was to identify the veterans that served in this area and to put faces to names, specifically put faces to names because Most of the names that you see behind me are still in this community, so it also, Annie and I are new to the community. We've only been here four years, so it's an excellent adventure for us to get to know the families and to get to see the faces of their loved ones. The display has photos of 37 veterans, along with write-ups about some of them and their time in service. The project includes veterans from the First and Second World Wars and the Korean War. Perry says learning about the person behind each story has been emotional. I think of Meryl Marshall who died on Easter Monday, April 1917 during the attack on Vimy Ridge. It's a very sad story. He couldn't find his body. He was buried on the battlefield. We have a nice picture of him and a write-up of his story. For Annie Perry, the project has been a chance to highlight women. She says female veterans have often been overlooked. I started the project and there was only men, of course, because most men went to the front line and, you know, saw horrible things and endured horrible things. And I said to Greg, I said, well, women participated in the war as well. So I said, we need to find women that, you know, we need to honour them as well because they played a pivotal role. It is, it's very emotional. The municipality's outgoing mayor was the one who first brought the idea to the Perrys. North Shore has a cenotaph, but the monument doesn't have any names on it. This way, the people can live on. It's an emotional time, and really we're trying to bring this forward so our children will recognize how veterans put their lives on the line so that we would have our freedom. The physical display will be taken down after Remembrance Day, but will stay up online. The Perrys say their next goal is to research more stories of those who served after the Korean War. And they encourage anyone from the North Shore with a family member who's a veteran to get in touch. Cameron Farquharson, CBC News, West Covehead.