At Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville, there are two plaques at the chapel entrance that always fascinated former student and history professor Andrew MacLachlan. The plaques commemorate the fallen “Old Boys”, BCS students and alumni who served and died in the two world wars, a plaque for each war.
After graduating university, and two decades of teaching overseas, MacLachlan returned to Lennoxville and to BCS to teach where he used to study. It was then that his interest in the memorial plaques was piqued once again.
“I was teaching here at BCS and 2018 was fast approaching. I thought to myself, we really need to do something to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice and memorialize the BCS students that died. Our curriculum was too full, and my history department was too busy and didn’t recognize that this was an opportunity that we should take, so I started a project on my own.”
MacLachlan started with a picture of the shrine containing the two plaques with the names of all the fallen alumni. With the help of a student stuck in detention, all the names were organized into a spreadsheet.
“Then from there I started doing some real deep dive research,” he said. After scouring the internet and printed resources for BCS archives, British commonwealth military records, personal memoirs and more, MacLachlan built up an abundance of information. He had means of death, location of deaths, burial locations, you name it. But what to do with this?
