http://www.torontofamilyhistory.org/TT%202009%20Jan%20Feb%20p1.pdf
ANCESTOR’S WW1 SILVER MEMORIAL CROSS FOUND ON eBAY
Marcia Cuthbert, OGS 13789
On July 28th, 2008, I was Googling some of my ancestors with unusual names to see if anything new had been added to the internet since my previous regular search. To my amazement I found an advertisement on eBay from someone in Minnesota who was selling the Killed in Action Canadian Memorial Cross medal of my uncle, Augustin Hague. The ad was accompanied by several photos of the sterling silver medal, now heavily patinated, showing Augustin's name and service number on the back, with a pin converting it into a broach, instead of the usual pendant suspended from a purple ribbon. It seemed that the sale had already ended before I came across the eBay item, and so I wondered if it would still be possible to track down the vendor and, through him, the successful bidder.
The person who was selling the medal had written on the eBay site that he had purchased the medal with the intention of adding a KIA Memorial Cross from a Minnesotan to his collection. But after doing some research on the internet he learned that Augustin was a Canadian from Winnipeg and so he decided to pass the medal on to someone else.
Augustin was killed at age 17 in WW1 in 1916, and the medal, also known as the Silver Cross, was originally sent to my grandmother who had been living in Winnipeg but who at the time was staying with my aunt in Minneapolis. Both are now deceased as is my cousin, but I wrote to my cousin’s son who still lives in Minnesota to let him know about the eBay sale. He didn’t know about the existence of the medal or how it got out of our family. But he had used eBay before, which I had not, and through his membership managed to locate the purchaser who lives and works in Peru - but originally is from Sudbury, Ontario!
After some initial e-mailing back and forth, the purchaser called me from Peru to let me know that he was coming back to Canada for a few days and would be willing to resell the medal. He also wanted to meet to get some tips on how to do family history research. So a few days later we met at the Toronto Reference Library for an introduction to Ancestry Library Edition where he was successful in finding a couple of generations of his British ancestors.
The medal had been sent to his home in Sudbury. But a friend and I were planning a trip through Northern Ontario in August, passing through Sudbury at the same time as he was going to be there! So on August 26th I made the purchase while we were in Sudbury - less than a month after first seeing the ad on eBay - and the medal is now back in our family’s possession.
At the November 24th OGS Toronto Branch meeting, I showed the medal in a display of materials relevant to family history along with a copy of the eBay posting and some other information about Augustin readily available on the internet - his 1915 attestation papers on the Library and Archives Canada Canadian Expeditionary Force site with his faked date of birth, his listing on the Vimy Ridge Memorial on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, and his name inscribed in the Canadian Books of Remembrance. But the advertisement was taken off the eBay site very shortly after I discovered it. So it seems amazing that I was Googling Augustin’s name during the short period of time that it was there. A lesson that can be drawn from this is to keep up regular searches on the internet. You never know what you might find!
