The Latta Lineage and the United Empire Loyalist

 AboutAnything  | Greg McComb 

 Lee and Dora Latta. That was how this photo (left) was labelled, one of several hundred I inherited in a tattered-carboard box from my father. 

   Who were they? No idea. My only clue was this couple was somehow related to my Grandma Edith Latta, who was an avid picture-taker-and-filer. Edith treasured and held onto this box of family photos for her entire life, passing them onto her son Keith (my dad) and then me, in 2007. Lucky they survived. 

  Funny how these things work out. Fast forward to 2025, eighteen years later.  mean, look at the guy. A cigarette dangling  from his lip, his steel helmet tilted-fashionably right, and then there is the sleeveless-sheepskin vest, possibly donated from as far off as Australia, and shipped to the front by the Red Cross.  These vests were the only thing standing between a soldier and a bad case of frostbite during months of winter-trench warfare in France. 

   You see, this is a photo of Hugh's unit taken around 1915 or 16 during World War I, at a camp on the frontlines in France. Possibly next  to the poppy fields that bloom today

in Flanders Fields, symbols of the million or more soldiers who were wounded, missing or killed in-action during the bloody trench warfare that defined this awful war, from 1914-18. I can't know for sure but the long-poles held by two of the soldiers were medieval-style pikes used during raids of German trenches. Canadians gained a reputation as fierce raiders using make-shift weapons like these pikes along with hand-made clubs, knives and small catapults. This was no high-tech war, hand-to-hand combat was not uncommon.