'I had to make the trip': P.E.I. man visits WWI cemetery in search of lost great uncle

Skip Beairsto's journey started with vague stories told by his father and continued via a park bench in Pickering, Ont., ending at a First World War cemetery at a tiny village in France.

The Kensington, P.E.I., man was trying to flesh out the memories of his great uncle Willie Beairsto. His father told him stories when he was a child about the great uncle who was killed in action just weeks before the First World War ended.

To have it come back to the family, well, it was really the instigator.- Skip Beairsto

"Those are just the fairy tales in your head at the time," said Beairsto.

"As time progressed and I did more research and things became available through the Canadian archives as far as military records, then of course your desire gets a little deeper."

He wasn't able to uncover much about Willie Beairsto. He was born in Bedeque, P.E.I. in 1890. In 1909 he moved to Saskatchewan where he become a homesteader. He worked the land until he enlisted in 1916. He sailed out of Halifax, trained as an infantryman in the U.K., and was killed on Sept. 2, 1918.

He also learned that his great uncle was buried at the Dury Crucifix Cemetery in Dury, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, a village of just a few hundred people. He began to form a plan to visit the gravesite. It felt like a way to make his uncle more real.

A mysterious discovery

It was one thing to plan, another to set a date. The idea remained something that would happen in the future.

Then he received a message from a woman in Pickering, Ont. She had Willie Beairsto's Victory Medal, which would have been awarded posthumously. Willie's name was engraved on it, and the woman found Skip through a posting on a genealogy website from a decade before.

"It had actually been found on a park bench," said Beairsto.

"To have it come back to the family, well, it was really the instigator that, yes, now I had to make the trip that I'd always wanted to make."

The 100th anniversary of Willie's death was coming up, and it seemed to Beairsto the perfect time to make the journey.

'One, red, blooming poppy'

The village of Dury greeted them with open arms. The mayor arranged a small ceremony with an exchange of gifts, followed by pizza and wine. Beairsto woke early on the morning of Sept. 2 to visit the grave.

"Dawn and I — Dawn, my wife — we went out and actually walked the battlefield that he would have walked on," he said.

"On the way we found one, red, blooming poppy. They're out of season, but about eight o'clock in the morning, about the time he would have been killed, that was the time we found the one, red, blooming poppy."

At the grave, Beairsto contemplated Willie's last moments, the chaos of gunfire, shellfire, the shouts and screams.

He left a mason jar containing a bit of Island sandstone and a few seashells at the grave, and then turned to go home.

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With files from Island Morning