For the past seven years, I have been mapping the homes of the next-of-kin of Ottawans who fell in the world wars and Korea. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, I tracked down the residences of nearly 2,000 men and women who died in service. When finished, each map was published locally around Remembrance Day. The final map, covering Lowertown, Ottawa’s oldest neighbourhood—a ramshackle, working-class, largely francophone community in those days—is published here.
Neighbourhoods across the country encountered similar fates, felt the endless blows to their hearts, felt their life blood seeping away. Parents stood by while their sons and daughters left home and began arduous journeys that would lead most to war and great risk of death.
Every pin on this map tells a unique story of hope and loss. The starred black circle near the bottom left of the map, for instance, was the hardware store of the Cuzner family, whose son Eddie was the 52nd victim of Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.
When the Second World War started in 1939, 80 Lowertown families were still dealing with the effects of the war to end all wars—parents shattered by the losses of children, veterans coping with wounds, gas poisoning or shell shock.
While the men detailed here all died in service to Canada, it was their mothers, fathers and partners who were conscripted to carry the burden of their sacrifice. This map isn’t about the dead per se. It charts the addresses of their next-of-kin, in a sense a geographic depiction of carnage on the home front and, largely, a visual representation of the emotional damage in Lowertown between 1914 and 1945.
—Dave O’Malley
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