Sue Knox is a local veteran and legionnaire at Moose Jaw's Royal Canadian Legion Branch 59.

Knox served for 22 years in the Royal Canadian Navy and prior to that worked for 10 years in DND. She can now add military historian to her resume.

For years Knox has been doing research and compiling information on local veterans who have passed during the First and Second World Wars.

She now has binders full of information on 500 individuals from Moose Jaw that served in both wars.

There are a couple of things that inspired her to dive into this project. It all started when she decided to look into her heritage using online websites that ended up with her finding information on her family's military background. She discovered that she had four uncles that all fought in the First World War. Three of them made were able to return home at the end of it but the fourth died in action and was buried overseas.

Knox is also a big participant in Decoration Day every June. She will go around the multiple cemeteries in Moose Jaw and decorate the graves of fallen veterans. During this endeavor, she along with others discovered dozens of gravestones of unmarked veterans.

"A lot of times the veterans don't indicate that they are a veteran when they purchase those (grave) sites. Then they kind of get lost to history but we've been able to find probably about 30 or 40 (gravesites) over the last three or four years who had graves that weren't marked specifically as veterans and we're able to mark those on Decoration Day," says Knox. "It tweaked me to continue that route and try and identify all the gravesites in Moose Jaw area that belong to veterans so that they can be appropriately marked."

Researching her own military history and discovering these unmarked graves inspired her to take on this project of researching, discovering, and commemorating the fallen veterans from Moose Jaw. She really got into digging up this information when the pandemic struck almost two years ago. It gave her the time to sit down and use her resources and she spent hours doing it. Since being a veteran herself and a member of the Moose Jaw legion, she had access to federal databases and records from the legion that not only allowed her to discover the names of the fallen soldiers but she also used online websites linked to Veterans Affairs Canada where she found detailed information on each person.

"The history is gathered through mostly the Government of Canada website for Veteran Affairs and each individual once you identify them has a little historical sheet and typically it gives their name, date of birth, their service number, the age that they died, the force that they served with whether it's army, navy, or air force," Knox says.

"Sometimes it will have the unit that they served with during their last deployment. It also gives additional information such as where they were born, their enlistment dates, their place of enlistment, and then some of them have a little bit of family history. So, who their parents were, where they lived in Moose Jaw when they enrolled."

Knox also added that there are typically photos included of the individuals themselves, their families, sometimes their gravesites, and even letters the soldiers wrote to home.

Knox now has three binders full of the names and information of people who have died in the war. The first binder has 180 men from Moose Jaw that lost their lives in the First World War. The other two binders are filled with 300 people from the area for died in the Second World War. All of these people were either serving overseas or were being trained here in Saskatchewan.

Knox is frequently discovering new information to add to her binders. She's working with City Hall to find more unmarked graves. She is also coordinating plans with the Last Post Fund to get headstones for gravesites that have no indication.

Anyone curious about researching veteran history can start at veterans.gc.ca which is one of the websites Knox used for her research.

On Thursday, we will remember the fallen with this year's Remembrance Day Service. You will be able to watch a live stream of the service right here on Discover Moose Jaw.