The Edward Bateman I remember as a little kid was our next door neighbour on the farm in Chatham Township at Oldfield – my Dad would be talking with him often enough and I recall myself being about eye level with the patches on his work overalls – anyway – Ewart was left the farm by his father in 1910 and his brother Ed ran it – that of course changed with his death in the war.  The photo of Ewart in my file is one that his niece Helen Elliot loaned me in 1982 when I worked out the Bateman family tree.  Helen gave me the story that her mother, Ewart’s eldest sister Sarah Helen Singer, when seeing him off at the train station in Chatham, had the cold premonition that he would never be coming back… (She had been mother to her siblings as their mother had died in 1891, age 45).

 

The Oldfield Church had a bronze memorial to Ewart on the wall and when the church was closing during the controversy with the United Church of Canada I contacted Helen’s daughter, Barbara Capeling and she came down from Houston Texas to see that the memorial was taken out and moved to the Baldoon Church in Dover (July 1992) – Baldoon and Dover Centre had also split from the United Church  and out of the 3 buildings the dissenting congregation kept Grace Baldoon – (Barbara’s husband was from near Thamesville and is J. Douglas Capeling, who was a Warrant Officer, Canadian Armed forces 1949-1969, so she very much felt that she had a vested interest in salvaging anything of her great uncle’s memory).