A long-lost family heirloom from the Second World War has now returned to the descendant of its rightful owner.
“We had a local gentleman that turned in a pair of military dogtags that he found in the area of Highway 33,” said Cpl. Jocelyn Noseworthy, a Kelowna RCMP member.
After a quick investigation, a Kelowna RCMP member deemed the dogtags to be authentic, but he couldn’t identify to whom they belonged.
That’s when he reached out to the Okanagan Military Museum.
Keith Boehmer, the museum’s military interpreter, examined the identification tags.
“Eventually (we were) able to track down the person (whose name was on the tags). He was a wartime navigator on Lancasters and bombers in the Second World War.”
That person was a Second World War bomber navigator named John Kenneth Dalgliesh.
Dalgliesh was a Royal Canadian Air Force officer and later a Lieutenant-Colonel, according to the Canadian Forces Officers List 1969.
“Based on the dogtags, he was in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. That pointed us to his trade. We don’t know what his squadron was, but we do know he was a navigator during the 1940’s in Germany,” said Boehmer.
With that knowledge, the RCMP was able to find a descendant of Dalgliesh.
“Our officer took that information and started to do some old-fashioned digging. Managed to locate his daughter, who lives in Calgary,” said Noseworthy.
RCMP said the daughter was ecstatic to have the dogtags returned, saying she had no idea they even existed.