Ernest Edward Boyce worked as a clerk in the hotel business in Amherst, Nova Scotia and lived with his wife Flora Brown before he joined the active militia no. 8 on September 16, 1915. Soon after, he was promoted to sergeant and became a quartermaster in charge of managing supplies and deliveries of wood and coal.

In November 1916, he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and requested overseas duty. Instead, he was put in charge of a prisoner of war camp near Amherst, Nova Scotia, likely due to his advanced age—he was fifty-years-old when the war ended in 1918. After the war he managed the Terris Hotel in Amherst. In 1929, he and Brown moved to Truro, Nova Scotia to live with his son Charles Hilton Boyce. The day that Ernest moved in he was sixty-one-years-old and said, “I’m coming home to die.” He died in 1956.

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