A GREEK SHORT SNORTER

It's a strange story, one that involves a Greek banknote, a teenage currency collector, a North Saanich historian — and a Second World War aircrew who made it home alive.

A five-man crew from Royal Canadian Air Force 437 Squadron — including pilot Reginald Barnhouse and flight officer Wilfred Louis Karp — were celebrating their return to Canada at a pub in a Montreal suburb.

Nobody's sure about how they got their hands on a 100 drachma Greek bill, but several of the aircrew signed it that night on Jan. 28, 1946, with the inscription "Lachine: Our First Bar in Canada."

Fast forward 78 years to last May, when 16-year-old Karolis Zegunis of Maple Ridge, a keen collector of currencies, walked into a local coin shop and bought a box of foreign bank notes for $400.

"There was a whole bunch of random stuff in there from all over the world," Zegunis said in an interview. "Soviet notes, Germany, Africa — even some from the Sandwich Islands."

But the one with ink signatures and a Second World War story caught his eye. "The ones with signatures can have a lot of value," the teenager said.

Zegunis posted a photo of the Greek bank note to a Reddit forum devoted to the transcription of handwritten documents.

That caught the attention of Second World War historian and former school teacher Peter Brand in North Saanich, who is well-versed in researching Commonwealth airmen, and had only signed up to Reddit a few days before.

Inspired, Brand set out to not only transcribe the signatures on the bank note, but to identify them and possibly locate their descendants.

Brand dove into a series of internet searches using the RCAF Squadron 437 website, Ancestry.ca, Newspapers.com, LinkedIn, Canada411 and Google. It paid off, and he was eventually able to find the extended family of the two pilots.

To read the complete article, see:
How a Greek banknote connected the families of a Second World War aircrew (https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/how-a-greek-banknote-connected-the-familes-of-a-second-world-war-aircrew-9788006)

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