“Some of the Lads Don't Offer Their Stories Easily, Do They?” The popularity of public television series Finding Your Roots, hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., often astonishes audiences with how the research staff of the series can reconstruct someone’s family tree, and piece together someone’s story with just the smallest strands of a paper trail. In the case of the Wartime Heritage Association, we often run across this situation where we know a war casualty’s name, but little or nothing else. Finding their roots is one of our goals. To include someone as having ties to Nova Scotia, for our curated list of all WWII casualties with ties to NS, we first need to confirm what that connection is by using the records available. As one of Wartime Heritage followers recently commented, “Some of the lads don't offer their stories easily, do they?” A recent example of this is the story of a “Curtis Warren” who served as a Merchant Navy seaman in both WWI and WWII, and just two months after the opening of the Second World War in September 1939, he died on December 15, 1939, while his ship, the SS Marconi, was in Santos, Brazil. The only record we had to go by was an index card from the Lists of Merchant Seamen Deaths at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London (UK, Merchant Seamen Deaths, 1939 -1953), which gave us the basic information that he was born in “Nova Scotia”. We knew little else. Curtis is not remembered by the Commonwealth War Graves, the Canadian Virtual War Memorial, or the Books of Remembrance in Ottawa so we had little to go on. We initially thought he might have been born in Centreville in Digby County, Nova Scotia, because this is listed as his address on the aforementioned card, as, “Westcott: Centreville, Digby County, Nova Scotia.” Whilst his mailing address may indeed be where he was born, we needed confirmation. We also could not determine where “Westcott” in Centreville might be. After an exhaustive examination of birth records, family trees of Warrens in Nova Scotia, census records, marriage records, and death records, we finally stumbled across something interesting. Although we didn’t find a “Warren” family with a son Curtis, we did find a family with their surname recorded as “Warne” in Hillgrove, Digby County, just some 30 kilometers from Centreville. The spelling of the surname as Warne appears to have been a transcription error and the family were indeed Warrens. We now had a Warren family with a son named Curtis in Hillgrove, and later Marshalltown, but how next would we connect him to Centreville? We next examined all marriages of Curtis’ siblings, and found that his sister Cynthia married Charles Hantford Wescott, and the couple settled in … of all places …. Centreville. Curtis’ parents had died before the beginning of WWII, and with no record of a spouse, an address could be that of a sibling. In Curtis’ case, the address on the record proved to be his sister’s home with her husband’s surname as, “Westcott, Centreville, Digby County, Nova Scotia.” That’s how we were able to confirm who Curtis Warren was. In compiling all the information one important part of the story remained a mystery: “Where was Curtis Warren buried?” An extensive search of cemeteries located in the Santos, Brazil area failed to provide a burial record, although a number of other Merchant Navy burials were discovered. It is possible, however unconfirmed, that Curtis Warren was buried at sea. A grave or a memorial remains ‘unknown.’ Curtis Warren now has a Remembrance Page on our website which we trust is befitting of his service. Glen Gaudet George Egan October 2024 Read his story at: http://wartimeheritage.com/whaww2ns6/wwii_warren_curtis.htm ‘