Many soldiers have tales of close calls. It was common for men in the Great War to have a nonchalant attitude toward danger; with death a possibility at any moment, it didn't pay to dwell on one’s mortality.

Kenneth Thomas Ferguson’s close call came in 1916.

A member of the 194th Battalion, he was part of a crew tasked with building a rail line near the front in France. One evening, the crew went home for the night. The next morning, they returned to find a giant crater exactly where they were to resume working. “The Germans had dropped a shell right in the middle of it,” Ferguson recalled, years later, for the journal Vergreville in Review. “We were lucky we weren’t there when it hit!”

Born in 1889 near Turtle Mountain, Manitoba, Ferguson enlisted in March 1916 in Edmonton. After the war, he returned to Alberta. A visit with his brother Milo in Vegreville, Alberta would prove fortunate. “Wearing his uniform, he met a young woman, Fannie E. McCleery, who struck his fancy,” explains Joyce Fingland, Ferguson’s granddaughter. “He obtained land through the Soldier's Settlement Board and they married in 1921.”

Do you have an ancestor who served in the Great War? Submit their story and it could be included on this Great War Album website.