Margaret Haliburton, the navy veteran from Toronto, in her uniform. (Historica-Dominion Institute)When Canada declared war on Germany on Sept. 10, 1939, Margaret Haliburton, then Margaret Lof, was a teenaged school girl excited by the prospect.

Haliburton described her excitement with an audio clip on The Memory Project: Stories of the Second World War, an initiative to create an online archive of the memories of Canada's veterans.

"I heard the announcement [that Canada had declared war] and I was rushing out the door and Mother said, 'Aren't you excited?' and I said 'I'm too excited to stop,' " said Haliburton, who went on to serve in the navy after leaving school.

She remembers meeting her girlfriends, who were all equally wound up about the news. But her mother later talked to her about what might be ahead.

"War was very well remembered by our parents, it was only some 20 odd years [since the First World War]. And they remembered it very well. And their attitude sort of sobered us down in a hurry," she said in the short clip.

Harsh time in Hong Kong

Haliburton's memory of the day Canada entered the war is one of seven posted online in a project by the Historica-Dominion Institute that will eventually gather memories from thousands of Canadian veterans.

Jean Paul Dallain of New Carlisle, Que., was taken prisoner at the Battle of Hong Kong and barely survived life in a POW camp.

The young men in New Carlisle were excited to enlist — the town ended up "second in Canada in providing soldiers for the cause," he said, in an interview in French.

The memories are just a taste of an ambitious project by the institute to gather the personal stories of Second World War veterans.

Jean Paul Dallain, of New Carlisle, Que., shown in 1941, before he spent much of the war in a POW camp. (Historica-Dominion Institute)"We really want to try to capture all of the stories of these veterans while we still can and have them available to people," said project manager Jenna Misener.

The average age of Canada's Second World War veterans is 87.

"Some of them don't like to tell their stories, but a lot of them feel that this is their last chance," Misener said.

"We want to build a legacy, we want to tell the story of Canada at war."

There are 175,000 Canadian veterans of the Second World War still alive and the idea is to get as many of their stories recorded as possible. The archive will gather individual stories of battle, memories of comrades, alive or dead, and of the experience of life in the services.

A team of five interviewers is phoning veterans who volunteer to be recorded and there will be a series of events across Canada over the next 20 months in which the interviewers can speak to them face-to-face.

The idea is to gather all their stories on a massive website that will allow students and teachers to learn more about the war and how it changed the lives of ordinary Canadians.

Misener said each veteran is also being asked to send memorabilia — including letters, photos, medals, war souvenirs or shrapnel taken from a leg — to be digitized and displayed on the website beside their story. Each item will be returned, she said.

An audio stream and transcription of their story into both French or English will be created for each person who participates, she said.

The site could launch by Oct. 1.

In the meantime, the existing Memory Project site gives a little taste of how Canadians remember the first day of the war.