In the 1990’s the Milton Historical Society initiated a project to interview the Milton Veterans who served so gallantly in the Second World War.The first set of these interviews was completed in the 1993-1995 era by Ken Lamb, in support of the production of the book “Milton Remembers World War II 1939-1945“. Interviews were recorded on cassette tapes, some of which were later transcribed and extracts used in the book. The tapes and transcripts are in the Milton Historical Society Archives. This project was undertaken in the period leading up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

The second set of interviews was completed in a time period from 2005 to 2007 by a number of MHS interviewers (Anne Taylor, Kay Bounsall, and Lou Bradley). The interviews are on cassette tapes held by the MHS Archives, however to date I have not seen any typed transcripts. Digital transcription software is now at a stage that this work may be warranted. At the time of these interviews, some of which are of the men interviewed in 1995, the veterans were approaching the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and thus were generally in their mid 80’s.

A third set of interviews was conducted by the Historica Dominion Institute for  “The Memory Project” in thus all of the digital information is on-line and not available at the MHS Archives at this time. We have however linked that project to the “MHS Remembers Projects of 1993-2007”.

Starting in late 2011, MHS volunteers started to digitize the analog tapes that were held in the MHS Archives. This work was undertaken as part of the Milton Soldiers Projects (now “Military“), as a new project had been initiated to add the men and women of Milton in the Second World War 1939-1945. Research on the Great War of 1914-1919 was coming to an end and new work on the War of 1812 was beginning. The digitization process was squeezed in between to ensure that the content of the analogue cassette tapes can be preserved into the next generation in a wide variety of digital formats. In addition to on-line local storage and hard copies (computers, hard drives, flash drives and memory cards), the information has also be uploaded the world’s largest digital collection of archived material at ARCHIVE.ORG.

Here is an example of what you will arrive at for each of the digital audio files. To listen to the audio, click the white arrow (play) in the black box in the upper right corner of these pages.

If you wish a copy of the page for reference or printing (as in above example)  for each of the men and women interviewed in the 1995 and 2005 eras, you can obtain that here: Internet Archive PDF of Title Pages.

In the table that follows, we have identified the names of the men and women were served Milton in the Second World War and subsequently participated in one or more of the interview processes. This is a “work in progress” and is by no means complete at this time. Please check back frequently to see what new works have been digitized and/or transcribed. Click on the YEAR link to access the online digital audio (streaming player – like a radio) or the digital paper file (download).

Please note that some of the 2010 interviews are for veterans now living in Milton but would not be considered as men or women from Milton at the time that WWII was in progress Interviews on the Historica Dominion Institute (HDI) may be extracts only. I will contact them to see if we can have a copy of the complete interview. If you know the full names of any of the veterans listed, or notice errors in the names shown, please e-mail your corrections to Richard Laughton – miltonsoldiers@gmail.com 

Where known, the year of birth and death of a veteran is shown under their name. If that date is highlighted it means that there is “Last Post” announcement on the current Milton Legion (Branch 136) web site. At some point, copies of those will be archived here so they are not lost if the Legion site is terminated.

Please watch this site for other Digital Audio Interviews in the future!
At any time just go to http://archive.org and search the term “MHS Remembers Project” (use the quotation marks) to find all of the digital audio files that have been uploaded. Do not search “Milton Historical Society” or “MHS” as there are many other!