A retired RCMP officer is dedicating his time to identifying and maintaining the graves of former officers.
Now he wants to rededicate the grave of an officer who died in the early 1900s; the only problem is, he can’t find any of the Mountie’s family members.
“I'm a vet. I expect one day I'll have a marker in the ground somewhere,” says Retired Staff Sgt. Tom Lowe. “Mine's gonna be in Newfoundland, where I come from, and I would like to know that down the road somebody would be interested enough to be looking after mine.”
Lowe supervises the identification, maintenance and inspection of grave sites of RCMP members. There are 294 that he knows of in Nova Scotia.
“We have them identified with the GPS coordinates for just about every grave and by the end of this year we'll have them all done,” says Lowe.
However, two years ago Lowe discovered an RCMP grave that didn’t show any of the force insignia displayed on the others.
“All that's on the marker is John F Kelly, 1901-1933,” says Lowe.
Kelly died while serving and today that would mean, at the very least, a regimental headstone.
“I was able to come up with his regimental number and details of his service,” says Lowe.
Lowe is now searching for family members to attend a rededication ceremony.
“I don't think he got it in his day and I just think he deserves it now,” says Lowe.
Lowe says Kelly was born in Halifax while his father, Peter Kelly, was born in Ireland in 1848. His mother, Elizabeth Reid, was from Windsor, N.S.
Lowe is hoping to hear from anyone who may be connected to the mysterious John F. Kelly, and from those who know of other unmarked graves of officers past.
“Once you work with police officers, and I worked with an awful lot in the 35 years, and the situations that we get ourselves into, you have to rely on them, they have to have your back and you rely on them for your very life,” says Lowe. “You form a bond, a relationship with those people that is unbreakable.”
