Frank Latham with his wife, Jean, and two small children, Barbara and Dennis.
Barb Latham uses VIU’s Canadian Letters and Images Project to immortalize her father-in-law’s story.
Flying Officer Frank Wilfred Latham enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the fall of 1942 in Calgary, Alberta.
Frank was serving as a wireless operator and air gunner on anti-submarine patrol with the 162nd Squadron out of Iceland when his airplane, fighting high winds and blinding snow, crashed into a mountainside on December 19, 1944, near Reykjavik. All eight crew members aboard were killed in the crash. Frank was 28 years old at the time.
His wife Jean had relocated herself and their small children, Barbara and Dennis at the time, back to Moose Jaw when Frank enlisted. The couple’s third child, Gary, born in July 1944, had died just two months before the crash that killed Frank.
Jean and Frank Latham’s story was buried for decades until upon Jean’s death in 1991, her son Dennis inherited a shoebox of his father’s letters. Again the shoebox contents remained unread. However, before Dennis’s death in 2019, Barb and Dennis contacted the Canadian Letters and Images Project (CLIP) asking to have the documents included in the collection. Read Frank Latham’s letters.
CLIP is an online archive of the Canadian war experience, as told through the letters and images of Canadians themselves. Started by VIU History Professor Dr. Stephen Davies as a way of showing his students the human side of the war experience, the website has grown to include more than 35,000 letters as well as images, diaries and other materials.
Barb says she was captivated by Frank and Jean Latham’s story and wanted to make sure it was captured in a way that was accessible to others.
“I wanted to remember him in some way that made his letters to my mother-in-law visible to his grandchildren who never knew him, and his great grandchildren,” she says. “I wanted everyone – including our Latham nieces and nephews, who are scattered across Canada –to learn more about Frank and Jean Latham. They had an amazing story.”
After seeing how wonderfully the Canadian Letters and Images Project told her father-in-law’s story, Barb was motivated to make a donation. The project employs students to help scan and input letters and images into the archive database, and relies on donor support to continue the work.
“I am so impressed with what they have done with this project, which is not something that happens easily at a small university,” she says. “It’s a high-quality project, and I had the resources and a love of Canadian and family history, so I’m very happy to support it.”
“It is an honour to be able to work with the collections,” says Davies. “Letters permit us to know those individuals as individuals, and not simply as the statistic or casualty figure that they became.”
To make a gift to the Canadian Letters and Images Project, please visit the campaign homepage. For more information on the project, email letters@viu.ca.
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