I’m thinking today of two distant cousins I never met because they sacrificed their lives in battle more than 40 years before I was born.

William and Nigel Boyd grew up Edinburgh, the only sons of William Boyd and Pictou, NS-native Laura (Crerar) Boyd. She was the sister of my great-grandmother, Jane (Crerar) MacKeen.My own link to them was a battered footlocker that was in our house until last summer. 

I know little of the Boyd brothers except what came down through family stories and the research of another distant cousin, David Crerar of Vancouver. I’ve never met David, but he’s fascinated by family history and has helped immeasurably with my own research into the MacKeens.

What I do know is both Boyd brothers enlisted to fight for their country in 1914 and shipped off to the front. William, the elder, joined the King’s Body Guard for Scotland, a part of the Royal Company of Archers. Nigel joined the Black Watch.

Neither would live to see 1916.

Nigel Boyd

Second Lieutenant Nigel Boyd fought at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 then the Battle of Aisne, which ended Oct. 1. Twenty-year-old Nigel was wounded at one point in the Aisne fighting, but held his position with his men. He died of his wounds in hospital.

On April 25 1915, William joined an attack on a German entrenchment (likely at the Second Battle of Ypres) and was killed. He was 22. I believe his body was never found because when my grandfather visited the Boyds shortly afterward William was known to be missing in action.  

After losing both their sons in the first eight months of the war, the elder Boyds lived on in mourning for several decades. The senior William Boyd died sometime during the Second World War, and after the war Laura Boyd decided to return to Nova Scotia. She died during the trans-Atlantic crossing.  

My grandparents inherited her possessions, and they included William Boyd’s footlocker, a black metal box that had been manufactured by J. Stewart & Sons of Edinburgh by appointment to the Royal Company of Archers.

I had the footlocker tucked in a closet for years, but it seemed that David Crerar would be a better steward of it than me. That footlocker represented something monumental, and it deserved to be in a place of greater respect. And David was the guardian of the Crerar story.

So last summer we shipped it off to David in Vancouver. I know David and his family will cherish it and honour the valour of the Boyd brothers.