Thanks this Remembrance Day to a local group that is providing military markers for the unmarked graves of dozens of our brave Veterans.

The Last Post Fund Ontario ensures that all Veterans are provided a ‘dignified funeral and burial, as well as a military gravestone, due to insufficient funds at time of death.’

The group is in the process of installing the markers for 23 veterans in Ontario cemeteries.

They hope to have them all installed by the end of October, just in time for a dedication ceremony during the week of Remembrance Day.

The Last Post Fund, which has been around since 1909, created the Unmarked Grave Program to provide military markers for unmarked Veterans’ graves. It is a national non-profit organization that is active in Halifax, Montreal and Toronto.

They have a ‘Righting a Wrong” program underway at the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital by providing long overdue recognition for lost soldiers, who are no longer forgotten.

As many as 23 veterans, some 19 who did not have markers, are believed to have been buried on the asylum cemetery.

Back then it was known as the Ontario Lakeshore Asylum Cemetery, also as the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Cemetery and Mimico Asylum Burial Grounds.

The group said since the first burial in 1890 the grounds have been the resting place for 1,511 indigent people, primarily patients of the hospital, including 10 infants.

The last burial occurred on March 1974. The Mimico Branch Asylum, later the Ontario Hospital: New Toronto, then Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, closed and partially “re-merged” with Queen Street Mental Health Centre in 1979, formally closing the burial grounds to further interments.

The Last Post Fund was founded in 1909 and has served some 15,000 Veterans from Canada and Allied countries.

They support initiatives designed to honour the memory of Canadian and Allied Veterans, in addition the group owns and manages its own military cemetery, the Last Post Fund National Field of Honour.