The countryside outside Courcelette, in France, is not particularly remarkable. The land rolls innocuously through farmyards, bluffs of trees and tiny rural villages where, this time of year, people are tilling the soil for planting.

Amid the oats, barley and rape seed that farmers are cultivating in this part of France, a family arrived from Canada, this past week. Near Courcelette, that family – equally unassumingly – came to a small cemetery last Sunday afternoon. One of its youngest members, Ryan Robertson, stood in the cemetery and did something unusual. He spoke in front of his family and some of his Uxbridge classmates about a cousin who died here in France 103 years ago.

“Oliver Barton arrived in the country in the summer of 1916,” said Ryan, reading from notes he’d prepared specially for the occasion. “Assigned to the 13th Battalion, on Oct. 8 (1916), Private Barton left his trench. But his battalion was practically wiped out by German machine-gun fire.” (more…)