It was on the day before Thanksgiving in 2008 that something happened that, a few years later, inspired my very first blog post... Read about it here -
"For the Love of Norman."
I like telling stories - and true stories are the best kind. That's why I like genealogy.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Thankful Thursday: Year Two
I realized the other day that I’ve been writing down and
posting my genealogy stories for two years now.
It prompted me to recall my favorites from year two…
Some stories caused me to learn new things…
» In Ezra Alger, I learned more about the
Civil War’s infamous Andersonville Prison, while doing research for a friend of
my husband’s.
» Writing Typhoid Fever and Tuberculosis
caused me to learn more about two diseases that carried away many of your
ancestors and mine, even into the 1900s.
Some stories were about the Amish research I’ve done for
friends and clients in Indiana…
» Jonas Stutzman, Amish Eccentric was
about a very “colorful” character who was also a significant figure in the
history of the Amish in the United States—“White Jonas,” the first Amish
settler in Holmes County, Ohio.
» An Amish Tragedy told the story of Jacob Lambright, an ancestor of many present-day Northern Indiana Amish, who met a
tragic end.
Some stories were about my own family...
» Josephine Carriveau was about my
favorite branch of my husband’s family—the Carriveaus. The stories just keep on coming from that
branch of the family! Josephine was my
husband’s great-aunt—his grandmother’s older sister.
» A Civil War Widow Applies for a Pension
was about my husband’s Alwood great-great-grandparents, what I learned about
them from his Civil War Pension file, and how I came to love fold3.com again.
» Hazel’s Quilt told the story of a quilt
that I have the privilege to own, handed down to me from my mother-in-law, who
told me its story when I visited her recently at her nursing home.
Some stories were especially close to my own heart…
» The Telegram was one of my numerous
stories about my father’s World War II experiences—this one about the injury
that almost killed him and how his mother first found out about it.
» West View Farm was about a place very
dear to me in childhood—my Grandpa and Grandma Erickson’s Illinois farm, and
the shocking change I encountered the last time I visited it.
"Remember me in the family tree
My name, my days, my strife;
Then I'll ride upon the wings of time
And live an endless life."
My name, my days, my strife;
Then I'll ride upon the wings of time
And live an endless life."
—Linda Goetsch
Monday, November 10, 2014
The Fire
This photograph shows one of the papers from my father’s WWII military file. I include it here not because of its great importance in the story of his military career—but rather, for the burn marks around the edges. Anyone who has done (or tried to do) research on a WWI or WWII military ancestor may know where those burn marks came from.
My father, Robert Wallin, told me many stories about his
time in WWII, and I have his letters home to tell me more. Like countless aging baby boomers with
fathers who fought in the war, I wish I had asked him so much more—and written
it all down or recorded it. So a few
years back, I decided to order his military records from the National Archives.
My father was in the Army, so his records are found at the National
Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis, Missouri. (Navy records are stored elsewhere.) Unfortunately, the NPRC had a catastrophic
fire on July 12, 1973. The National Archives website says that 80% of the
records were destroyed for Army personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960. That covers World War One, World War Two, and
the Korean War—what an extensive and devastating loss! (Many Air Force records were also destroyed.) No duplicates, microfilm, or other backups
were kept. And since there were no
indexes, there isn’t even a good listing of what was lost.
About 6.5 million partially burned, water-soaked personnel
files were salvaged. Over forty years
later, preservation specialists are still working on restoring them. It takes the equivalent of 30 full-time
employees to respond to the requests of those, like me, who are looking for
records from the damaged collection. Of
the 5,000 requests per day that the NPRC receives, they estimate that about
200-300 are for those damaged records.
Those requests go to the specialists at the Paper Treatment Lab, who
call the burned records the “B-Files.”
After the fire, the B-Files were taken to the vacuum-drying
chamber at the nearby McDonnell-Douglas aircraft facilities. The vacuum chamber, which was built to train
Mercury and Gemini space program astronauts, was now put into service in taking
8 tons of water out of each 2,000 milk-crate-sized containers of wet documents
which the chamber could handle per drying session. The files were then indexed and stored, to be
handled again only if a document request is received.
I was fortunate that my father’s military and medical
records (which were extensive) survived the fire—although barely, as the photo
shows. Some had burn marks and some had water
damage stains, but at least I received the file. The records for my grandfather, Sture Wallin,
who served in World War One, are entirely gone, so I was told in a letter from
the NPRC. To my knowledge, no one in the
family recorded any details whatsoever of Grandpa Wallin’s service, and no
papers have survived. Gone forever.
The MissouriNet website says that, incredibly, the NPRC continued to use the old building until 2012! The NPRC “now has a new state-of-the-art
building with some serious ways to prevent a fire from destroying national
records.” Thank goodness for that.
NPRC
building photo:
National Archives
Monday, November 3, 2014
A Dad and a Hero
This paper from my father’s military file tells the story of
something he did in March 1945. (I will tell the story of the burn marks on his records in another
post.)
The paper reads as follows:
“First Lieutenant
Robert M. Wallin, 0538229, 120th Infantry Regiment, United States
Army, is awarded the Bronze Star for heroic achievement in action on 26 March
1945, in Germany. Although enemy fire
was so intense that it killed one man and wounded eight others, Lieutenant
Wallin and his comrades left their sheltered positions and exposed themselves
to enemy fire to evacuate three of the men to the rear where they received
medical attention. By his heroic action,
Lieutenant Wallin aided in saving the lives of his comrades.
[Entered military
service from Illinois.]
L.S. Hobbs, Major General – U.S. Army Commanding”
The amazing thing is this:
Dad had just spent five months in a military hospital recovering from
serious injuries sustained on the front lines the previous October. So it’s certainly not like he thought he was
invincible… And how could he? He had seen more horror and death by this
time than anyone should have to see—stories he told me late at night when I was
growing up… Stories of comrades dying in
ways I can only hope their families never knew. Dad’s very first day in combat, his closest
friend in the unit was blown up and dismembered, and Dad had to gather the pieces
and lay them with the man’s dog tags.
According to my father, stories like what happened the day
he got the Bronze Star weren’t that rare.
What was rare was having a superior officer see or find out what
happened, and then take the time to write it up. Just from the few stories Dad told me late at
night, I know of at least two other times where he was in this much danger.
One of them was a situation similar to this one. Dad (a platoon leader) told me that one of
his men was badly wounded during a battle.
Dad crawled across a field to the man, and realized right away that if
he had run across the field standing up, he probably wouldn’t have lived to
tell the story. He had a struggle of
conscience as to what to do… The man had
both a broken arm and a broken leg, so he would have to be carried back across
the field, through enemy fire—and it looked like the man outweighed Dad by fifty
pounds.
Dad asked the man, “Do you have a family?” and the man
answered, “Yeah, a wife and three kids.” Dad told me he remembered saying to himself
something like, “Oh, crap!”—knowing what it was he thought he should do, but
not wanting to do it. But he hoisted the
man onto his shoulders and staggered back across the field. Both of them made it back alive.
In the case of the Bronze Star story, it was Dad and several
comrades who evacuated three men. We’ve
all heard the motto of “no man left behind,” but it’s still incredible that
young soldiers can summon up such courage in the face of such danger.
If my father and his comrades hadn’t made it back to their
“sheltered positions” alive that day, I wouldn’t be here today. But because they did, three other men went
home to quite possibly have children of their own as well—perhaps even someone
who is reading this story today.
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