As I walked through New Calvary Cemetery outside Boston, I couldn’t help but think about the young men who toiled in the trenches dug throughout Europe’s fields and forests a century ago. The whistle would sound, they would clamber over the top and make a mad dash across no man’s land, getting caught up on barbed wire, slipping in the mud, as they were torn to pieces by artillery and machine-gun-fire or crippled by poison gas, with hand-to-hand combat being their reward if they made it across the field of battle.
After following a path to discover my family history in World War I, I ended up at the cemetery, pondering the indifference exhibited worldwide in regard to the war and the men who shed their blood in it. I was also searching for the unmarked grave of my great-grandfather, Pvt. Elmer Kenneth Gorham, a medic with the 101st Ambulance Company, 26th Yankee Division, Massachusetts Army National Guard.
SIDEBAR | How to get started on your own journey to find the military records of your family
Finding his final resting place amid the rows of headstones, obelisks and lawn level markers proved to be as difficult as locating his records in the U.S. government archives. The majority of Army personnel records from 1912 through 1959 were destroyed in a fire in 1973, according to researchers from the National Personnel Records Center, which holds one of the largest collections of federal records in the country, including military personnel records. Approximately 16 million to 18 million Army and Air Force files were lost.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the markers of these brave Americans have been swallowed by the earth in cemeteries across the nation. Roadside graves have been disturbed and desecrated across Europe by souvenir hunters and remains picked clean of identifying markers like dog tags, buttons and helmets. Sadly, many of those items wind up in makeshift home museums or auctioned on eBay.
It was a long hard road to find Pvt. Gorham.
According my family, Elmer Sr. had served in the Army during World War I, then in the Marine Corps. He fathered 10 children in the Boston suburbs, where he worked as a railroad electrician.
My grandfather, also named Elmer, was the oldest. He was 15 when his father died in 1939 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 41.
Elmer Jr., now in his 90s, had served in the Marine Corps during World War II and later the Korean conflict. He had few memories of his father, who worked nights and slept during the day.
I wanted to know more about the man who raised the man who had played a large role in raising me. So I visited the NPRC website in November 2013 and filled out and mailed in the form to make my request.
By February 2014, I had his Marine Corps file from after World War I and a note telling me that his Army records had burned.
It was little solace, but I did find that Elmer had an “excellent” service record in the Army and that he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1920 for two years. The record included a grainy picture. In it, he was handsome with short cropped hair, looking much like my grandfather as a young man, yet he appeared weary, with bags under his eyes.
Elmer served on board the USS Pennsylvania, and his unit received a commendation from famed general John Lejeune. However, Lejeune and another famed general, Smedley Butler — for whom bases in North Carolina and Okinawa, Japan, are named — would pursue court-martial proceedings against him for desertion. Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge would write asking for a status update on behalf of the family.
In one instance, Elmer attempted to traverse several states on foot to make it back to his unit. We might never know what happened to him or why he wound up several states away with no money.
He was caught with a criminal and put on trial. He was acquitted in court as he would later be acquitted in the court of military justice, and he was honorably discharged in 1922. His records indicate his sobriety was “excellent.”
Rumors swirled in the family that he had gone missing in Europe while World War I raged and that he may have been taken prisoner.
I had to dig deeper.
I reached out to the Fort Devens Museum in Devens, Mass. My grandfather had been discharged from Camp Devens after the war. They referred me to the historians at the Massachusetts Army National Guard.
While I never received his records, my persistence paid off. I was able to get a few pay slips and documents with his signature on them.
I discovered that my great-grandfather’s division had been the first full division to deploy to France. He saw action in the Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives and the Champagne-Marne defensive, and had cared for the wounded in the Chemin des Dames, Toul-Boucq, Pas Fini, Rupt and Troyon sectors. They also referred me to a dozen books that detailed what his unit had been involved in, including “A Grateful Heart: The History of a World War I Field Hospital” by Michael Shay.
The pieces were starting to come together.
His division had fought the Germans bravely in the trenches, attacking and repelling attacks, and had advanced 33 resisted miles, suffering 2,168 dead and 13,000 wounded. His ambulance company treated many victims of poison gas. They were continuously under fire near the end of the war.
“The wounded came in in a steady stream, requiring long hours of duty on the part of the personnel, which also suffered heavily from casualties and carried on only with the greatest difficulty,” according to the Report of the Commission on Massachusetts’ Part in the World War, a history published in 1931 by the commonwealth.
At last, I had found him.
Cemetery records brought me to a cemetery in Mattapan, a suburb of Boston, and a grave stone that read “Julia Walsh Murdock, 1848-1913.” This is where Elmer had been buried in haste without a marker some 75 years earlier in a plot that belonged to family on his wife’s side. We have no idea who Julia was.
Not long after our August visit, and after using the records to navigate the world of veterans’ benefits, a marker was finally installed in front of Julia’s headstone.
Now, Pvt. Gorham belongs to the ages, his name etched in stone along with his service during The Great War. It may fade with time and someday be reclaimed by the earth, but by installing it, we are saying thank you, at least for today, 100 years later.
Resources
How to get started on your own journey to find the military records of your family, from Catharine Giordano, of the Stars and Stripes Archives/Library.
National Archives
Answers many questions, including who can request, what records can be requested and possible fees:
Master Index of Army Records
Lists Army records available from which eras and which repositories have them. Includes things like morning reports and unofficial unit histories.
Library of Congress digitized WWI Stars and Stripes
Choose to browse or search Stars and Stripes by keywords.
Stars and Stripes online historic archives
Europe and Pacific editions from 1948-99, as well as the London and Northern Ireland editions from 1942-45.
American Battle Monuments Commission
Agency in charge of America’s overseas battle monuments and cemeteries. Includes a search engine to find a grave.
Veterans Affairs Department grave locator
Site locator for military graves in the United States.
Army’s Force Structure and Unit History Branch
Organization is not very user-friendly (especially for a person not fluent in Army lineage language), but has many layers with many nuggets of information if you dig deep enough.
Some highlights:
Resources for WWI research, which include order of battle of U.S. Expeditionary Forces.
An extensive lineage series, which provides information on unit organizational history.
Naval History and Heritage Command
While the actual deck log of a ship would be held by the National Archives, this FAQ tells you what a deck log is (and that there is no such thing as a captain’s log unless you served with Capt. Kirk aboard the Enterprise), what information deck logs hold and what they don’t, where deck logs from various eras are stored and how to contact those places.
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