Memory Anchor app collecting stories of those who served

Minister of Veterans Affairs Canada and Associate Minister of National Defence Ginette Petitpas Taylor, left, and memory Anchor co-founder Ryan Mullens use the company’s interactive app during D-Day 80 services at the Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery in Normandy, France. Photo: Veterans Affairs Canada

Officer Cadet Laura Lascelle 

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As much as the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) has embraced its future during this year’s centennial celebrations, using an augmented reality application, digital exhibitions, virtual reality cockpit experiences and flight simulators to showcase the organization’s rich history; so, too, has the remembrance of our fallen soldiers benefitted from advancing technology.

A Canadian veteran-founded start-up software company, Memory Anchor, recently partnered with the RCAF Foundation to provide walking tours for the Toronto Union Station’s RCAF Centennial Banners project. Memory Anchor aims to continue to change the way the world remembers its veterans.

Memory Anchor started from an idea in 2017, when co-founder Ryan Mullens visited France and Holland for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Mullens, who owns a set of flutes carved from the wood of Vimy oaks, played “Amazing Grace” at several Canadian memorial sites he visited.

“I was with a World War II vet – his name was Willie McGregor, and it was his second time visiting his brother, John McGregor. He had asked me to play ‘Amazing Grace’ for him and his brother,” says Mullens. “It was just a really beautiful experience playing that and, as I’m finishing up, I was talking to Willie about his brother, looking over Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery – there’s 3,000 Canadians buried there; and, thinking of some of the guys we lost in Afghanistan…. You know, there’s so much more to those individuals than just a name or a headstone.

“That’s where it really hit me: we have to really do something different in order to really connect people to the stories of who these people were.”

Memory Anchor has now commemorated over 200,000 soldiers, a number that grows exponentially every week.

“We’re now at the point where we can geo-locate, using our AI processes, tens of thousands of people per day,” says co-founder Matthew Cudmore. With the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) as a primary client, the Calgary-based company has only scratched the surface of its goal to create meaningful, easily-accessible biographies of fallen soldiers using AI technology.

“The CWGC tend to 1.7 million graves and 22,000 graveyards around the world, and we really are aiming at servicing our G7 countries and being able to bring our technology to them so they can commemorate and remember their soldiers,” says Mullens.

Graphical representation of what the Memory Anchor app displays.
Photo: MemoryAnchor.com

Memory Anchor’s current clients care for over two million burials in over 23,000 locations in more than 150 countries.

“It’s been a really cool and humbling experience to be able to see an idea of a headstone in a graveyard overseas, now in the hands of hundreds of people; and WWII vets using it to find their friends,” says Mullens, who was also able to attend the D-Day 80th anniversary in Normandy this year. “That was a really emotional and powerful experience.”

For Cudmore, a charitable project with the No Stone Left Alone Foundation in Edmonton left a lasting impression with him.

“They’re a charity that really does an amazing job connecting school kids and schools, to get them out to military cemeteries and, every Remembrance Day, place a poppy on each of those graves. The student will research each of those soldiers as well.

Cudmore read one soldier’s file, and it stood out how young he was – in his early twenties, and what he went through getting a character referral letter from the department store he worked at so he could enlist.

“That was really touching: to profile him, and then to visit him in the cemetery. It was really special to me.”

Memory Anchor has partnered with Veterans Affairs Canada to accomplish multiple digital projects across Western and Central Canada.

“It’s not just old conflicts – these are modern conflicts, too,” says Mullens. “I took my good buddy, Josh Morris, who served in Afghanistan in ’06 with the PPCLI (Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry); to the Peacekeepers Park Wall of Honour in Garrison Green, in Calgary. It was a meaningful moment: we joined around the same time, we’ve been friends ever since and just him seeing some of the guys he’s served with, sitting and talking with him as he used the Memory Anchor app on that wall – that was a very poignant moment.”

With their projects spreading across the country, the founders hope to extend into Atlantic Canada.

“It’s all about engaging people coast to coast,” says Cudmore. “We haven’t made it east of Ottawa yet in terms of projects, and we would love to. I have family still in the Annapolis Valley and in Halifax.”

Cudmore had seven family members serve in the Second World War. All returned home, including his grandfather, Arthur King Cudmore, who returned to Middleton to serve as the Royal Canadian Legion Branch No. 1 president; and his uncle, Mark Smith, who served with 429 Bison Squadron and later erected the 429 Squadron Monument at the Old Trinity Church Cemetery in Middleton.

Find out more about Memory Anchor: memoryanchor.com

Veteran Andrew Bird was able to use the Memory Anchor app during D-Day 8 events to help him find a relative, in Normandy, France, 80 years after he was killed in the D-Day campaigns. The app included photos and information Bird had never seen: William was “just another hero, paying the ultimate sacrifice on that historical day in military history. Then, 80 years later, you blew my mind when you showed me his details. That had to be the most precious and kindest thing anyone has ever done for me, on such a special day! You should be very, very proud of what you do for people like me.”