Interview with Kim Dodge

My name is Kim Dodge, and I'm a forty-eight year old female who's very interested in my great grandfather. We only know him through his letters and his artifacts that he left us from the First World War. They're very vivid and interesting to look at . He actually became my great grandfather through meeting my great grandmother. She was a grade school teacher, and she was entertaining the troops with her class in Grimsby, Ontario. She didn't really notice him during her entertainment, but after he was overseas in 1916 he started to write her letters, and he wrote very regularly all during 1916/17/18. In 1919, he was discharged and he came home, and they were married. My grandmother was born, and he was going to France to start up a company for the (?) Tool and Die Company as an Overseas Officer, and he just left for France and disappeared. We never heard anything more from him. My great grandmother raised my grandmother as a single mom in 1920, and she was a packrat, thank goodness, and she kept absolutely everything, so I have all the letters and some interesting things that he left. Apparently, he was enlisted in the Cycle Corps, and then he was an interpreter, and he had some maps and things from the front line from when he did some investigative work. He spoke German and French. He went across the lines in the Cycle Corps and deciphered messages, and we have some decoding of German maps and different things like that. But that's all we know of him – what he wrote us in his letters. He was a British man. My great grandmother searched for him… we found some letters that he had tried to search for him until 1960. She never remarried, and she kind of kept things quiet. They didn't talk about things back then. By the time I realized what was really going on, she was well into her nineties and didn't speak of it at all. We have no answers as to where he went or what happened, or where he was from. So it's a genealogical project of mine now to find out about him. I'm just going to keep searching, because the artifacts I have speak so much of him and his service in the First World War, and what a time it was for them.