Using Canadian WWI War Diaries for Military Ships with Civilian Passengers

Toronto Star

A great resource that many people are not aware of is the war diaries for ships during and after WWI. If your war bride travelled on a ship that contained military men, you might be able to locate a war diary for their sailing at Library and Archives Canada in War Diaries.  Some are online, while others are available on microfilm only. An alternative viewer for war diaries is online at UVIC C.G.W.P. War Diaries.

To do a search for the diaries for ships do an Advanced Archives Search for War Diaries and add the name of the ship on the second line in the search function. They show up under War Diaries - Progress Charts, Transports  Olympic for example.

Lily May Young married British-born Canadian Expeditionary Force soldier Samuel Palmer (Regimental #778984) in 1918 in England. Sam was a widower with three young children back home in Ontario. Not long after she married, Lily left from Southampton, England on the Olympic on 1st November 1918, intending to travel to Toronto and set up a house for her husband and his family while he was still overseas.

Lily travelled to Canada during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, so I was interested to learn whether the cause of her death was influenza. The passenger list for the Olympic shows her name is crossed off and the info "died at sea" is written above her line on the manifest but no cause of death is listed.

Olympic Passenger List. Library and Archives Canada

In order to confirm how she died, I needed to find an alternative source of information about her death. That is where the war diaries come in useful. This is one page from the November 1918 sailing of the Olympic. 

War Diaries, Olympic. Library and Archives Canada

The diary records that Lily took sick with a septic throat and was placed in an isolation hospital on board on 4^th November. She died on 8 November 1918, at age 23 of Broncho-pneumonia and septicemia and was buried at sea the next day. The ship landed at New York two days later on the 10^th. 

Sadly, she was just the first of many young war brides who died during their journey to Canada. Officials on the next sailing of the Olympic issued gauze masks to the passengers in order to keep the outbreak on board to a minimum but it didn't stop the deaths of a number of war brides coming to Canada during the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919.

Source:
Canada Passenger Lists, 1881-1922. Database with images. FamilySearch.orf http://FamilySearch.org: 27 August 2018. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

MIKAN 2005288 War Diaries - Progress Charts, Transports: OLYPMIC = Journal de guerre - Tableau d'avancement, Transports: OLYMPIC. 1916/09/14-1919/04/21. Library and Archives Canada 

(c) Annette Fulford, September 2018
Updated on January 23, 2021