7 Ways to Research WWI Veterans in Your Community


Seventy First Regiment Leaves for Camp of N.Y. Division.(NARA RG165-WW-288C-067)

Congratulations on taking the first step of wanting to learn more!

Ryan Hegg of the WWI Centennial Commission for New York City asked me if I believed that the WWI Generation was really the Greatest Generation. What a thought provoking question! Ryan makes a great case. WWI was a defining point in our Country’s history as a participant on the world stage. Theirs was a generation who decided to go overseas to fight the Great War for Civilization. They experienced the Great Depression.

Students have a number of resources to find WWI veterans who were  residents in their communities. The ideas below start with those that take least effort to those that require more advanced skills. (For those who do not know if they had ancestors who served in WWI, a future blog post will cover that topic.)

  1. Locate a WWI Memorial in your city or town. There may be a statue in a park or a plaque in a public building. You can contact your city or town office to ask if such a memorial exists. When you locate the memorial, you can take pictures of it and copy the names that you find. If you want to learn more about those individuals try some of the other steps.
  2. Ask at a local cemetery about WWI veterans’ graves. The tombstones for service members who died during the war or later should show the branch of the military, the war, and their military organization. The cemetery office should be able to help you locate the graves of WWI veterans.
  3. Go to your local library and ask to speak to the research librarian. The library may hold special books telling about local men and women who served in WWI. There many also be files of materials donated by local researchers, which may be called vertical files. They may have fold local newspapers or files of newspaper clippings.
  4. Contact the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). Each Post is unique and has different polices pertaining to its community service efforts. You can visit VFW’s Find-A-Post feature here to locate a VFW Post and its contact information. Ask to speak with the Commander or Quartermaster.
  5. If there is a local historical society, genealogical society, or historical museum in your area, call or send an email. I have found WWI collections in unlikely locations, such as the Laws Railroad Museum and the Holland Land Office Museum
  6. Research local newspapers of the time. You can check the Library of Congress Chronicling America website to find out what newspapers existed at the time, and see if any of them have been digitized. Many community newspapers printed articles about the men and women who served. Search for WWI and your community name. 
  7. Head back to your library and find out what databases are available. Your local library may have access to Ancestry.com, Fold3.com and ProQuest and other Historical Newspapers. Librarians should be able to help you search for more about a specific WWI Veteran using his or her name.

Beyond these steps, much of the research involves looking for material about a military organization in which the veteran served. There are several posts on this blog about learning more about WWI Veterans.

Good luck!

Researching North Carolina WWI Ancestors

Learning the military organization for your ancestor who served in WWI is important. With that information, you can find out what your ancestor did including duties, travels and battles.

For North Carolina WWI ancestors, you can access North Carolina, World War I Service Cards, 1917-1919

https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2568864

You will need to sign up for a free account with FamilySearch.org to be able to search and view results. FamilySearch is a resource that will be useful for you, as it contains many records online and indexes to records.

At FamilySearch you can search for records, or browse through the records. Try searching for your ancestor’s name.

For an example, I entered just a surname. This type of search is good to find other family members who served.

The search results are below.

Click on the camera for the result to view the record.

In this card you can find out the military organization, and information about overseas service, wounds, grades and discharge. If the ancestor died in service, the card will have a red tint and give information about when, where and how the ancestor died.

From here you can download and print the record.

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources is chronicling the experience of NC in WWI. You can read about the traveling exhibit and other resources on this page.

You can read about the digital collection here.

The State Archives of North Carolina have World War I Papers.

You might want to look for your ancestor’s name or military organization in the finding aids Private Collections of the State Archives of North Carolina. These items may not be online.

 

NARA’s History Hub

Have you used the History Hub at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)?

Who better to ask about NARA Records than NARA itself!

The History Hub is a place on the web where you can visit and ask questions in different communities at NARA. Do you have a question about finding military records or want to learn more about a topic? Then one of the related communities might be a place to look for information that has been posted, or post a question of your own.

To view content and ask questions, you will need to register for a free account.

If you want to be able to post questions and make the most of the History Hub, you will need to register for an account. Select Register in the upper right corner of the webpage. The first step is to provide an email address.

After you enter your email address, and select Confirm address, you get a message in your browser.


If you do not see an email from the History Hub soon after the request, be sure to check your email spam folder. Sometimes emails can be automatically marked as spam.

Follow the directions to confirm your email address and fill in a short registration. You are led to pick a username and a strong password for your account. Be sure to read the hints about what characters need to be in the password.

There are different communities, each with its own manager. You can search for information about a topic, or ask a question. Inside the community, you can find Featured Content.

So, do you have questions about a topic you have been researching? Do you wonder if NARA has any records related to the topic? This is the place where you can ask. A NARA staff member will answer your questions. Other researchers may also share their insights about the topic, too.

For example, I was interested to know which records NARA had about Base Hospital 37 during WWI. I had an answer in a day, telling me what records were available and where they could be found. There were two records groups with information about this Base Hospital, 120 and 112, and the reply included information about which boxes to access. My next step would be to email the archivist and get further guidance about their availability.

When you make a post, it will be reviewed by the moderators. You will receive an email letting you know when your comment or question has been approved and is visible to the community. You will also receive an email when someone replies to your post.

From your profile, you can add a photo or select to view your content. Selecting Your Content shows the posts you have made.

Another great place to post a request for help is the “Researchers Help” Community.


When you view a post, you have options to follow, bookmark, share or like the post.

So, get onto the History Hub and see what answers and resources await you!

Interview with Historian and Author Alexander F. Barnes

Recently, I had a chance to ask WWI Historian Alexander F. Barnes about his latest book, “Forgotten Soldiers of World War I: America’s Immigrant Doughboys” written with Peter Belmonte. In it, he discusses the impact our immigrant ancestors made by fighting in WWI.

 

1) What inspired you to write this book?  

In 2014 I wrote a book called “To Hell with the Kaiser: America Prepares for War 1916-1918” in which I described how the American Army was organized, trained, and deployed to fight in France. I spent a lot of time researching each of the thirty-two main training camps and a lot of the smaller specialty camps. It was an eye-opening experience as I learned about the methods used to raise the Army and exactly how the conscription process was designed. There was so much to tell about this story that it ultimately took two volumes to contain all of the information Along with the story of the camps and draft boards, I found I needed to tell the story of the conscription of African-American and foreign-born soldiers as well as the impact of Spanish Flu on the training soldiers and units. When all was said and done, the books were published and almost all of the comments and letters I received were about the chapter on the foreign-born soldiers. It turned out that darn near everybody had a foreign-born or immigrant Doughboy in their family tree.  In the chapter, I had included my wife’s grandfather (born in Italy and serving in the Depot Brigade at Camp Upton) and my daughter-in-law’s great-grandfather (born in Ireland and serving in the 80th Division) and everywhere I went I heard similar stories.  I work as the Command Historian for the Virginia National Guard and one of the officers in the Headquarters brought me into his office to show me a picture of his grandfather from Norway who served as a machine gunner in the 89th Division.  I quickly realized that this was a story that deserved much more than a chapter. I had met Pete Belmonte electronically when he helped me and another writer, Kevin Born, when we were working on our book about the US Military’s Desert uniforms, patches and insignia. Pete had served in the Air Force during Desert Storm and he shared images of some of his uniform patches for our book. I also knew of Pete as being the author of a fantastic book about the Meuse-Argonne that was published by Schiffer Publishing, the same outfit that publishes my books. So I sent Pete a message and asked him if he would be interested in teaming up to do a book on the foreign-born immigrants in the American Army in WWI.  After he agreed, we sent a letter to the publisher and a received a contract to do it.

 

2) What about these soldiers was “forgotten”?

That’s a great question. The forgotten aspect of these soldiers is the very fact of their service. During my presentations about WWI for the Virginia National Guard and for the Virginia WWI Commission I always include a bar-chart slide that contains my self-invented scale of “Unknownness.”  I start out with the 153 Virginians that served as the MP Company in the Rainbow Division, then move to the 400 “Hello Girls” telephone operators in the AEF, and then to 230,000 Doughboys of the US Third Army who served in the occupation of Germany after WWI, and then the 367,000 African-Americans who served in the Army and then the final bar is for the 800,000 foreign-born men and women who served.  The point I try to make is that over the last few years books have been written and well received about all of the other previously little-known soldiers. And that all together, their total doesn’t equal the total number of foreign-born soldiers. Equally importantly, there were foreign-born soldiers included in all of those other “unknown” groups.

The final statistical report for the American forces in WWI estimate that at least 20% of all of the soldiers were born in another country. You would think that 20% of a force of 4 million men would earn some significant notice and yet, except for anecdotal references, these soldiers remain fairly invisible. One exception to that is the diary of Alvin York. York’s diary includes numerous references to the struggles and triumphs of the foreign-born soldiers in his unit. So if America’s most famous Doughboy could see that there was a story that needed to be told, who were we to ignore it?

 

3) What was the most surprising discovery you made while researching this book?

There were many things that surprised me. I don’t know what surprised Pete the most because he had already been walking this path by researching Italian-Americans in the Army in WWI but for me it was the numbers of men and, in some cases, women who were of foreign birth and originating from countries you don’t usually think of. Everybody could probably guess that there would be a lot of Italians, Irish, Poles, Scandinavians, and Germans because those have always been significant number of immigrants from those countries. But I never expect to find so many Greek, Dutch, Latin American, Canadian, Indian, Albanian, Armenian, and even Australian men serving in the Army. Perhaps the single most telling statistic we found was that of the 609 men and women from the Rochester, New York, area that died from all causes during the war, 56 had been born in Italy- a total of 12 percent. There were many others also foreign-born who died but to find 12 percent for one group (and of that number, 41 were killed in combat) was just eye-opening.

 

4) How were enemy aliens treated in the U.S. military? Why were some discharged while others served?

Now that is a complex topic. The honest answer is that the response by the US military and its unit leaders was mixed and situationally-dependent. National Guard units in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas were representative of their local populations and therefore contained large numbers of German-born men and sons of German-born men. The 32nd Division was even nicknamed the “Gemuchlicheit Boys” (Fun-loving boys) because of this fact. When it came time to select units to serve in the American Occupation of the German Rhineland after the war, the 32nd was chosen to be one of the lead units, possibly due to the fact that so many of the men were able to speak German.

Men from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were also drafted and while many of these were not trusted and so ended up being discharged, enough remained in the ranks to serve well. Well enough in fact that the Army was organizing a Slavic Legion for service overseas when the war ended.

What makes this a hard topic to get a handle on is the fact that parts of the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires were so little known to the average American Draft board that often large numbers of men were lumped together: an Armenian might be considered Greek by one draft board and a Turk by another. Similarly, men from Albania or Bulgaria might be lumped together with Greeks, Macedonians, or Turks.  Ultimately, it was the luck of the cards and some men who wished to serve in the US Army were discharged and others, desperately wanting to be anywhere other than in the US Army, were kept. The overwhelming job of building a four million man Army in 17 months was bound to cause a lot of mistakes and, as usual, when mistakes are made in a military organization, it’s the guy on the bottom of the ladder that pays for it.

 

5) What is your next project?

We have another Barnes and Belmonte project we are putting the finishing touches on, also for Schiffer Publishing. We have written “Play Ball! America’s Doughboys and the National Pastime.” It is evenly split in telling the story of the Major League ball players who served in the Army during the war and the baseball-crazy non-professional ballplaying Doughboys who played everywhere they stopped for the evening.  Some of America’s greatest Major Leaguers served in the Army and Navy, some paying the ultimate price for their service. The regular Doughboys indulged their love for the game by playing right behind the front lines. It’s a great story that uses mainly primary sources and a number of never-before published photographs.

 

Alexander Barnes was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and grew up in an Air Force family. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1974 and then joined the Army National Guard in 1977, retiring as a Virginia Army National Guard chief warrant officer in 2004. He retired from US Army CASCOM at Fort Lee in July 2015 after 30 years of service as an Army Civilian.  He has a master’s degree in Anthropology and authored “In a Strange Land: The American Occupation of Germany 1918-1923,” “Let’s Go! The History of 29th Infantry Division,” and “To Hell with the Kaiser: America Prepares for War,” a two-volume set describing America’s entry into WWI.    His latest book, co-authored with Pete Belmonte, is “Forgotten Soldiers of WWI: America’s Immigrant Doughboys has just been released.  He is currently serving as the Command Historian for the Virginia National Guard.

“Forgotten Soldiers of World War I: America’s Immigrant Doughboys” is available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores as well as online stores.

3 Ways to Find WWI Officer Experience Reports on Fold3

This week I have been working with an interesting record set, the WWI Officer Experience Reports-AEF on Fold3. These records are reports from officers about engineering activities in the AEF. Although there are names in these records, their usefulness goes beyond individual names because they hold information about the military organizations. The names are those of the officers filing the reports to the Chief Engineer of their Army, but the activities are those of the whole military organization to which they were attached.

If you had a WWI Ancestor who served with engineers in the U.S. Army, you might want to check out these records.

The reports are individual accounts of the activities of the engineering officers. It is interesting to read the approach each officer took to telling his story. Some accounts are written in first person, some in third person and there are even poems. Comparing the different accounts of the same event is also interesting. One example is the 816th Pioneer Infantry experience on the trip to France. The Regiment traveled on three ships; one of which had engine trouble and fell out of the convoy. The reports differ on which day the engine trouble began, and how it was remedied. One report gave an officer’s impressions of sub-watching duty in a crow’s nest with a group of sea-sick men.

Most accounts discuss the work done by the engineers, and the officers give examples of the contributions of their men and how proud they were. A few officers express disappointment at arriving in France just before the cessation of hostilities. Then, there are personal accounts like the Lieutenants who hitched a ride to the front with some performers and ended up at a village between the lines. The WWI – Officer Experience Reports can be found here.

 

1) Search by name and/or keyword

When we try a new database it is natural to search for a name or a keyword. For best results, enter your engineering soldier’s name with his military organization.

2. Browse the records.

After you have searched for names, you may find that a better way to go through the records is to browse them. Next to the search box is a “Browse” button. You can also browse the records here.

When browsing these records:
Category = WWI
Publication = WWI Officer Experience Reports – AEF
Unit, select your ancestor’s unit from the list
Name, select names from the list within the unit

When you select a name, you will find that officer’s experience report. The reports may be typed or handwritten. You may find that there the officer made duplicates of the reports.

3. Combine browsing and searching

Browse to the military unit and search the subset of records by entering keywords and selecting the keyword option from the drop down menu. In the example below, with the 806th Pioneer Infantry Regiment records selected, I entered the keywords: 806 pioneer headquarters and selected keyword search from the dropdown menu.

The results of the example search are shown below.

No matter how you get to the records, click on the thumbnail of a page to see a larger image of the page and interact with it. You can read the page online, download it, bookmark it on Fold3 (when signed into an account) and save it to an individual on a family tree at Ancestry.com (when signed in). You can also use the arrows on that appear at the bottom of the page to move forward or backward through the pages of the record set.

For those who share my interest in the Pioneer Infantry, you will find that there are reports from the 59th, 806th, and 813th Pioneer Infantry Regiments.

The value of personal accounts cannot be overstated. By committing these stories to writing, the officers are able to share what they did and saw and felt. These reports bridge the century between both of you, so you can spend time to hear the stories they tell.

 

 

Family History Outing: WWI at the Holland Land Office Museum

In addition to the displays of Holland Land Office material, discussed in the Family History Outing: The Holland Land Office Museum blog post, there was another exhibit of interest to me. The HLOM has an exhibit “Over There to Over Here: 100 Years Later, Genesee County in the Great War,” which is featured on their website.

The Museum is home to artifacts from the Great War. Soldiers’ equipment, uniforms and other WWI memorabilia are on display. There are artistically decorated helmets, and sheet music. Every item is clearly labeled, and the exhibit has been put together with great care and thought. In the displays, WWI history moves beyond the descriptions and illustrations in books to real objects. For me, seeing a soldier’s pick, that had been over than back over here, brought to mind equipment used by the Pioneer Infantry Regiment.

The exhibit includes a book where the names of Genessee County residents who served in WWI have been collected. Some were residents before the war, while other veterans settled in Genessee County after the Great War.

 

It is always important to check the holdings of all the museums and archives in your ancestor’s local area. For example, Executive Director Duffy told a story about one visitor who was surprised to find several items, including a dogtag and discharge papers, for a relative he did not even know was a soldier in WWI.

The Museum also display items from the military service of Genesee County residents in other wars. Even though we did not have Genesse County ancestors, we enjoyed this part of our visit to the Holland Land Office Museum. So, if you find yourself near Batavia, NY, think about stopping in.

To learn more, visit the Holland Land Office Museum website.