Joseph Francis (Frank) MacDougall served as a guard at the Spirit Lake internment camp in northern Quebec. A private in a composite regiment, MacDougall made it as far as England before he was sent back to Canada because of an injury he endured while working on the farm before enlisting on August 17, 1917.
He was born on December 1, 1894, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and his mother died when he was an infant. His dad remarried and later died when MacDougall was fifteen-years-old. Left alone with his stepmother on his family farm, MacDougall moved to Montreal at age sixteen.
In 1920, he married Mary O’Connell and they moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he worked for an ice cream factory. They had nine kids—Teresa, Catherine, Helen, Margaret, John, Joseph, Sheila, Geraldine, and Robert.
He died January 27, 1989 and O’Connell died March 24, 1980.
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