{"id":23257,"date":"2019-03-15T18:45:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T22:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=23257"},"modified":"2019-03-15T18:45:58","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T22:45:58","slug":"time-travellers-diary-nursing-sisters-overseas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/time-travellers-diary-nursing-sisters-overseas\/","title":{"rendered":"TIME TRAVELLER’S DIARY: Nursing Sisters Overseas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Erika Baird
Executive Director, Aurora Historical Society<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was\nnot only men who went overseas during World War I. A number of Canadian women\nalso went over, serving as Nursing Sisters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nursing\nSisters had served in Canada since the North-West Rebellion of 1885 and had\nproved themselves to be very effective. All of the women were volunteers\nbetween the ages of 21 and 38 who were trained as nurses. During the war, the\nsisters were not directly at the front in the trenches, but they could be very\nclose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nwoman from Aurora who served with this distinguished group was Kathleen Sisman.\nSisman was born on March 16, 1883, to Thomas and Emily Sisman, and grew up on\nMosley Street. In 1905, she left Aurora to attend Nursing School at Roosevelt\nHospital in New York City, graduating in 1908. After graduating, she remained\nin New York, living in a nurses\u2019 residence in Manhattan Ward 22 (1910 American\nCensus). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1916,\nshe had returned to Canada on an April 21, 1916 she enlisted in the Canadian\nOverseas Ex-peditionary Force as a Nursing Sister. Her records state that she\nwas 5 feet, two inches tall, 110 lbs, and had all of her teeth! She was first\nposted to Granville Hospital in Ramsgate, England, before being transferred to\nShorncliffe, in July, then to France in April 1917. She continued her service\nuntil after the Armistice, finally sailing home on May 30, 1919, after 3 long\nyears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sisman\nsurvived the war, as did most other Nursing Sisters. Of the 2,504 who served,\n53 were killed in action, including 14 who perished when the Canadian hospital\nship Llandovery Castle was torpedoed by a German U-Boat (Veteran Affairs\nCanada).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nCanadian Nursing Sisters were nicknamed the \u201cBlue Birds\u201d during the war due to\ntheir uniforms, which consisted of blue dresses and white veils. <\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Erika BairdExecutive Director, Aurora Historical Society It was not only men who went overseas during World War I. A number of Canadian women also went over, serving as Nursing Sisters. Nursing Sisters had served in Canada since the North-West Rebellion of 1885 and had proved themselves to be very effective. All of the women […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-637","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-15 11:34:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}