November 11th is months away, but a group of military buffs from Huron County aren't going to wait. They'll be spending this Easter remembering the forgotten war dead.
Jim Rutledge, Sid Bruinsma and Jeanette Elliott are leading a group of Huron County history buffs to the battlefields of Europe.
They are hoping to visit the gravesites of the nearly 500 men and women from Huron County who died in the First World War, including 17 sets of brothers.
Rutledge, author of 'Heroes of Huron,' says "It's an honour for us to do what we're doing...We're going to be visiting the headstones of as many of our boys as we can and we'll be laying flags at their graves."
Elliott lost her great uncle in Passchendaele. She was the first member of her family to visit his grave overseas and says most soldiers' headstones have never been visited.
"There are cemeteries in Belgium and that part of northern France that are everywhere, often located just down the street from each other. So there's hundred of thousands of graves."
But this isn't just a trip to remember Huron County's fallen, it's about research as well.
Rutledge has already compiled the stories from the 204 Huron County natives who didn't come home from the Second World War, and on this trip he's looking for the nearly 500 who perished in the First World War.
"My dad was overseas and he changed. I wasn't born but my mother said the man looked the same but what was inside and what she loved was gone. So I wanted to find out why, to know why," Rutledge says.
There's also a plan to rub shoulders with Dutch royalty, in the hopes of wooing them to Goderich for war memorials set to be marked in the near future.
Bruinsma, who is taking his first trip to the gravesites, explains "We're also going to go to The Hague and hopefully be succesful in having some royal family come."
The history buffs leave on Good Friday and return in early May.
