Private Arthur Charles Dagesse

He was born on September 17, 1886, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Anatole and Marie Angele (nee Branchaud) Dagesse, who were French Canadian (he is listed as Joseph C. A. Dagesse on his birth record, as adding Joseph to a name was apparently common practice for French Catholics at that time, but is known as Arthur Charles everyone else.
There is also some confusion as to whether his surname was actually Dagesse or Degasse. It appears he enlisted under the name Degasse, which is how he is referred to on all the Canadian military records, but his name was actually Dagesse). His father worked as a druggist, and died when Arthur was 13. By 1901, the family had moved back to Quebec, where the three oldest children (from 12 up) all appeared to have to work to support the family. Arthur had an older sister, Alma, two younger sisters, Josephine and Rosa, and a younger brother, Anatole. Arthur enlisted on September 23, 1914 with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force. Prior to the war, he had worked as a cook. He was only 5’3”, with brown eyes and black hair, and had a scar on his chin.

According to an unusually detailed family tree on Ancestry (which unfortunately has very few sources to back it up), he married Nettie (aka Hettie aka Lottie) Miriam Downing, who already had one child named Percival. She was from Wimbledon, and it was evidently where they got married, and where she was living when he died, at 98 Merser Road. They supposedly had a son, Jack, together, who died in infancy, but if the dates given on the family tree are correct, they don’t quite match up. After Arthur’s death, Nettie emigrated to Canada, apparently intending to stay with her brother in Ontario and work as a nurse, though she soon remarried. I do know that Nettie lived at Cambridge Villa, in Merton, for most (all?) of her childhood, and she was working as a nurse at Horton Asylum, in Epsom, in 1911. And she got remarried, to Francis William England, in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1921.

What I CAN back up with sources, is that Arthur was executed by firing squad for desertion on March 15, 1918 near Calais, France, and buried in Lapugnoy Military Cemetery. He was pardoned in 2001.
Here’s a link to his Find a Grave record: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=DAG&GSpartial=1&GSbyrel=all&GScntry=7&GSsr=1&GRid=56528174& He’s commemorated on page 604 of the First World War Book of Remembrance. http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/books/page?page=604&book=1&sort=pageAsc