Honoring Our Nation’s Heroes

About six years ago, in the Spring of 2009, I approached a friend from church, Bob Kauffman, who was a WWII veteran and offered to help him take the many shorter papers he had written over the years and turn them into a book. We finished that project in the late summer and it was successful beyond what either of us could have imagined. But this blog is not about that book, rather about something else that happened because of it.

It was a few years later that I became aware of an effort to build “digital memorials” for each of the men in Bob’s unit, the 36^th Armored Infantry Division (36AIR).  There were a few people working on it, primarily located in Europe. Each digital memorial would contain information about the individual (date of birth, date of death, where they were from, what unit they were in, rank and serial number, where they were buried, and where possible both a picture of the grave and a wartime picture of the individual). There were about 900 casualties in the 36AIR, so it was taking a while to locate all this information.

Initially I only helped find the needed information for the individuals in Bob’s book who had been killed during WWII. Then, realizing all the skills that I had in doing genealogy searching using ancestry.com would be useful in this work, I offered to help in a much larger capacity. So I requested a copy of the database (in the format of an excel workbook), so I could “fill in the missing information.” Over the next few weeks I put in perhaps 40-50 hours of research.

Not long after that, the group decided to expand from just researching the 36AIR, to the entire 3^rd Armored Division (3AD), the “Spearhead Division.”  So from 900 casualties, our scope expanded to about 2500 individuals. 

While the number of people working on this project has remained relatively small, numbering no more than ten or so, we are a very devoted bunch of people. I have never met any of them face-to-face, but we have still become good friends, working on a common cause.

I have membership in three major research websites – in addition to ancestry.com, they include fold3.com (a database of military records), and newspapers.com (just what it sounds like). I use a combination of all three of these as well as carefully honed Internet searches. A really great find is when I can locate the headstone request – a document that a family member filled out requesting the government to pay for a standard headstone for the burial. This document contains almost everything we need with the exception of the pictures. But once we know the cemetery, we can often get a picture of the headstone. Pictures of individuals are found in either family trees in ancestry.com, newspaper articles about the individual, or sometimes by locating living relatives and seeing if they have such a picture.

And our work is not complete. We have a standing offer to any family member of someone who might have survived the war but who has since passed away to build a digital memorial for them as well. As an example, we have one for my friend Bob Kauffman who passed away in 2013.

This is a real labor of love. If you want to see the results of our work, you can check it out at http://www.36air-ad.com/. The group also maintains two pages on Facebook – just search for “The 3rd Armored Division during WWII” or “The US WWII 36th Armored Infantry Regiment”.

These are the fallen heroes of the “greatest generation,” who left the comforts of the US to participate in a far off war. They gave of themselves, and many times of their lives, in service both to their country and to mankind. May we always remember their sacrifice!