Not Exactly A Love Token, But A WW1 Experience Token On A Mexico 8 Reales 1836.

It's especially interested as I live in Ottawa. Ottawa was a major enlistment centre just after the outbreak of the war. People could have come here from hundreds of kilometers away.

That is a really cool coin with many stories to tell, oriole!

There are some serious stories behind those inscriptions.

Yes, it would be rewarding to track down the individuals and find out what became of them. Their descendants, if either has any, might still be living in my city. The Smith name is probably hopeless due to it being a nickname and how common it is. Deslauriers is not rare in my area, but it might be traceable.

That would be my assumption; I don't see a reason why a Canadian soldier would put those places and dates on there if he weren't there then. To me, the biggest mystery would be why two people, specifically, were named on the piece; having two names would seem to defeat the purpose of a "dog tag" style name badge to be worn in combat. I can only assume the place-names were added at the time while a POW, and the names of the servicemen were added after the fact, once the prisoners had come home.

Trying to find a random soldier named "Smith" in the war records databases would be a daunting task, given how common that name is and the uncertainty over the first name. There are 386 hits for "Charles Smith" in the database. But "Harry Deslauriers" is a little more manageable.

According to the Canadian Government Library and Archives, there were 90 people with the surname "Deslauriers" in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in WWI. None were named Harry, Henry, Henri, or any of the other names usually slangified to "Harry". It may have been his second name; there was one soldier named "Joseph Henri Deslauriers", though that fellow seems to have preferred to spell his name "Deslaurier" instead. Or "Harry" may have been a nickname he chose to go by, or (as was common back then) be a nickname assigned to him by his comrades.