When SVWM launched just before Remembrance Day 2010 there were very few images on the site.  Ben Charron, computer guru, managed to scrape together a few (largely courtesy the South Saskatchewan Regiment) so it wasn’t completely barren when it hit the ether.

Then we got to work.  My book Age Shall Not Weary Them (published in 2005 with the collaboration of Doug Chisholm and Beth Parsons) contained a thousand or more headshots and Printwest supplied us with a disk, so finally we had some pictures.  Hundreds of people from (literally) around the world submitted photos and documents and the image file grew steadily.  This past May and June I uploaded 1600+ images from Library & Archives Canada sent to me by my friend Arnold Kay at Ottawa.

The result is that as of Canada Day 2013 SVWM contains the following (the counts as of Remembrance Day 2013 are in brackets):

headshots                                  2189             (2542)

North West rebellion                        74                (74)

Boer War                                       13                (13)

WWI                                          4203             (4475)

WWII                                         9296             (9589)

Korea                                                               (61)

Peacekeeping and Afghanistan                             (108)

for a total of 15,898 (16,942).  Not bad!

Thanks everyone for your help.  But please don’t relax – it particularly grieves me that we have headshots for fewer than 20% of our fallen.