Nominal Rolls-18th. Battalion(Windsor)

18th Battalion Nominal Rolls-Windsor


The link to the Windsor part of the nominal roll is in Google Docs. Hopefully it works!

I have isolated  the men who signed up with the 18th. Battalion in Windsor, Ontario from 1914-1915. This does not mean that these men were all from Windsor or Essex County. It is not as easy as all that. Many Windsor men signed up with other battalions such as the 1st.Battalion (this one will be more difficult as their attestation papers were signed in Valcartier) , or were residing in other areas of Canada in 1914. As I track them down I will update this list. Finding when they returned to Canada will take time. Very few returned in March, 1919. Some returned earlier as wounded  Some were moved around to other battalions throughout the war.

What is interesting at this point is to look at the makeup of those who volunteered. If my math is correct I have 191 names. Of those 145 were born in the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland). That is 76% of the full compliment. There were 23 Canadian born. That is to say  about 12% of the total. That pretty much conforms to recent writing on the Canadian Corps that maintains that in the first three years of the war the Canadian Corps was pretty heavily weighted with men with very strong ties to England. The sad thing is that with the wastage of the Western Front most of these men were gone by 1917.

I expect that when I begin to look at the Nominal Rolls of battalions raised after 1915 I am going to see a much higher percentage of Canadian born in the lists. Those that did survive the trenches up to 1917 became the trainers and leaders of the raw battalions that came later.