Adding a personal touch to Remembrance Day
October 29, 2025 - Tim Bryant, Western Sentinel
Remembrance Day is an important time on the historical calendar, and one Canadian organization is doing what it can to keep that importance front of mind with students.
No Stone Left Alone, founded in 2011 by Edmonton’s Maureen Purvis, has engaged nearly 90,000 students across Canada and the world by making Remembrance Day more interactive.
Instead of a simple school presentation with a video, a mock cenotaph and maybe a soldier or veteran speaking to the crowd, No Stone Left Alone gets students outside to directly interact with Canada’s war history.
“I want you to imagine a young student in front of a veteran’s headstone, placing a poppy, saying their name out loud and researching who they were,” Purvis explained. “In that moment, remembrance becomes personal and that legacy of service lives on.”
From two schools in one cemetery in Edmonton in its first year, No Stone Left Alone has grown to more than 13,000 students honouring more than 123,000 veterans from 217 communities in 327 events across nine countries in 2024.
Ceremonies have been held in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. This year also sees the first ceremony in Asia, with Hong Kong hosting one in October.
Among the most memorable for those present, and also among the most challenging, took place at Pic Du Douly in the French Pyrenees. In 1944, seven members of the RAF’s 624 Squadron died when their Halifax bomber crashed at Pic Du Douly. On the 80th anniversary in 2024, seven new headstones were placed at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at the crash site. The new headstones were transported to the cemetery by motorized wheelbarrow up a 2.5‑kilometre mountain trail. The cemetery at Pic Du Douly is the highest and most difficult Allied cemetery to access in Europe, and it’s a testament to the many volunteers and RAF and French military personnel involved that the ceremony took place.
No Stone Left Alone’s growth over the last 14 years has stunned Purvis.
“I have days I’m still in shock,” she said. “I go, ‘I had no idea.’”
But its start was even more humble, and much more personal, than even that single cemetery in 2011.
In the early 1970s, Purvis’s mother, Lillian Mary Hidson, a Second World War veteran, made her daughter promise to remember her on Remembrance Day, which had originally been named Armistice Day when it was first observed in 1919.
“She was dying,” Purvis recounted. “She asked, ‘Maureen, please don’t forget me on Armistice Day.’
“I haven’t forgotten and every year since her passing, I have placed a poppy at her headstone.”
Caption
A Junior Canadian Ranger lays a poppy during a No Stone Left Alone ceremony in the abandoned community of Anyox, B.C. in 2022.
Photo courtesy No Stone Left Alone
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A student lays a poppy at a Canadian veteran’s headstone at a past No Stone Left Alone ceremony in Regina, Sask.
Photo courtesy No Stone Left Alone
That tradition carried on into Purvis’s adult and married and motherhood life. She and her husband, Randall, would take their children to their grandmother’s headstone and place a poppy.
“We’d all place our poppies and we’d have a moment of silence,” she said.
They’d then take the children to the cenotaph in Edmonton’s Beechmount Cemetery.
“I’d have the kids look back at all the headstones, and we’d just take a moment [to show] a little bit of respect there,” Purvis said.
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Tourville‑les‑Ifs, France, hosted the first No Stone Left Alone ceremony in France in 2022. Organized by No Stone Left Alone volunteer Russ Frederick, a wreath of poppies and flags were planted on the grave of Flight Sergeant William Donald Pagan to honour his passing in the line of duty.
Photo courtesy No Stone Left Alone
Caption
A Great Vigil dusk ceremony takes place at the Beny‑sur‑Mer Canadian War Cemetery in France on June 5, 2024. A group of students from Winnipeg, Man.’s Collège Miles Macdonell Collegiate on a European tour attended the ceremony on behalf of No Stone Left Alone. Along with a handful of No Stone Left Alone volunteers, the students help place 2,049 poppies.
Photo courtesy No Stone Left Alone
Caption
Since 2017, students in Krakow, Poland, have held a No Stone Left Alone ceremony. At Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow, students from School 58 participate in a heartfelt ceremony where they place poppies on the headstones of 483 Allied soldiers, including 15 Canadian veterans.
Photo courtesy No Stone Left Alone
One year, one of her daughters asked why all the headstones didn’t get their own poppies. That was the spark that ignited the No Stone Left Alone movement.
Purvis reached out to the Minister of Veterans Affairs with her idea. She met a young Lieutenant‑Colonel who also liked the idea. And then a chance encounter with the Alberta Minister of Education was the final step in getting that first No Stone Left Alone ceremony off the ground.
The minister put her in touch with one public and one Catholic school. Working together, they picked a date to do the first ceremony at Beechmount Cemetery.
“All the military members were lined up at the headstones,” Purvis recounted. “The two schools got off the buses. We had the poppies, and we did a tiny, tiny little service with no fanfare, no microphone, no podium, no setup at all. And we placed 4,000 poppies that day.”
That first ceremony landed on the front page of the two Edmonton daily newspapers, and things took off from there.
“We’ve never had to pick up the phone and ask for a community to participate,” Purvis said, saying it’s been word of mouth and exposure to the event itself that has driven No Stone Left Alone’s growth.
“This type of program really becomes community based.”
For Purvis, a big part of No Stone Left Alone is getting the children involved.
“For these kids, they never really get an opportunity to be around a serving member,” she said. “Maybe they come and talk at their school at remembrance week for a few minutes, but at our events they get to stand right next to them.”
This lets the children ask questions of the military members, and sometimes the youngest ones will imitate the military members’ salutes.
“That’s a big part of it, too: that interaction between the serving members today and engaging with the kids about the serving members of the past.”
As to No Stone Left Alone’s future, Purvis admits it’s a bit challenging because she’s working to draw attention to something intangible—remembrance and commemoration—instead of something like a park or a disease. Nonetheless, her hope is it continues to grow and spread.
“I want it to go on beyond me,” she said. “I want it to be able to just sustain itself right to the future.”
As the years pass and the Second World War and Korean War pass out of living memory, and more recent conflicts leave the general public’s consciousness, ceremonies like those promoted by No Stone Left Alone serve an integral function of ensuring “Lest we forget” doesn’t become simply words.
“In a time when history can feel distant, No Stone Left Alone brings it to life,” Purvis said.
To learn more about No Stone Left Alone, or to donate to keep the mission of remembrance and commemoration alive, visit the No Stone Left Alone website.