Veterans Day is a time of memory and reflection for those of us who had the benefit of being born to good parents.
I’m an Army veteran, but I was fortunate never to have to prove how tough I was under enemy fire.
Many of our ancestors showed up when it was time.
99’s father survived a Nazi shell that knocked out his tank during the Battle of the Bulge.
My Dad was a US Navy veteran of World War Two. He served against the Japs.
My Dad’s older brother Uncle Chuck served in the Army in World War Two. So did my Aunt Billie, who was a nurse during the war. She married Uncle Chuck.
My Dad’s younger brother Uncle Don served in Korea as an Army medic. The Red Chinese and North Korean bastards used his medic’s cross for target practice; they wounded him five times. He had the Purple Heart with a silver oak leaf cluster to prove it.
Uncle Rusty served in World War Two as a bomber crew member. He won a Distinguished Flying Cross for a bombing run against the Japs during which the aircraft’s bomb dropping mechanism failed. Uncle Rusty basically did a pull-up and kicked bombs free to drop them on enemy targets. He damn near fell out of the plane, but he was so fired up he didn’t consider it till after he pulled himself to safety.
My Aunt Olive was an Army nurse during the Korean War.
Virtually all the men in Dad’s circle of friends at our parish and elsewhere were veterans of World War Two or Korea.
Both of my grandfathers were veterans of World War One. Grandpa Charlie was a sailor, but he didn’t leave the US. Grandpa Leo, an infantryman, got gassed by the Krauts in France. It would eventually cost him his eyesight. Granny Theresa’s brother Emil was also gassed and died young.
Grandpa Charlie came to America from Ireland when he was five years old. Grandpa Leo’s parents came to America from Ireland not long before he was born.
On my mother’s mother’s side, her ancestors came from the Czech lands about the time of the Civil War.
Granny Ruth’s uncle was a Navy veteran of the Spanish American War.
One of Granny Ruth’s Czech ancestors and a collateral ancestor served in the Civil War. One had a hard assignment – the Union’s Army of the Potomac. The other served under General Sherman.
Many of 99’s people served in the army of Austria-Hungary. We have pictures of one who served for Franz Josef in the late 1800s, and of one who served for him during World War One. 99’s people on her mother’s side came to America from Slovakia in the early 1900s.
Some of my family served in Ireland’s war of independence against England after World War One. Dad met them when he was a kid, and said it was one of the few times in his life he was awed and impressed.
That’s our families’ trees. Many others have similar foliage.
Tuskegee Airmen, World War Two
Back through history, “average” men showed up to do heroic things when their people needed them. This is the real story of Veterans Day – it’s not to honor the generals who received adulation in their lifetimes, but to remember the rest of those who served when they were needed.
Family diaries and news clippings and photos are artifacts of your people’s past you should put into order for yourself and those who follow you in your family line. Video your older family members sharing their remembrances so you and your loved ones will have them. We are fortunate my parents did these sorts of things for us, and we are continuing the tradition.
Public records in our nation’s archives, court houses, history books, and public libraries are also of use to you as a family historian as well as they are of use to professional historians.
So are other sources of information.
One time I asked kids at a Catholic school in Pennsylvania, “What is the best known public record in the world?”
A couple of the sixth-graders blurted out, “The Bible!”
Exactly. The Bible traced the history of the Jews, the narrative of Christ, and the start of Christianity.
But even the Bible doesn’t have everything in it. For example, the account of Veronica wiping the face of Jesus is not in the Bible. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It merely means the Evangelists didn’t include it in the Gospels. Eyewitnesses to the event mentioned it and the incident became part of “Tradition” – facts about God, angels, the Church, and its members that are recorded in sources other than the Holy Bible.
Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus by Jacqueline Milner
(By the way, some early Jewish Christians pointed out Veronica was the wife of Zacchaeus, the little tax collector who went straight because Christ was able to bring out the good in him. Imagine being hostess to Christ! And imagine the guts it took for her to do Christ a kindness in the presence of the Roman soldiers and the howling mob when He was on His way to crucifixion!)
John the Apostle noted Christ did more things than could be contained in all the books of the world. That was his way of saying he didn’t include everything in his Gospel.
The Bible did not mention the murder of Julius Caesar or the death of Augustus or the rule of Caligula the sex-crazed Roman Emperor. But other sources attest to these events.
I have written about the trial where French clerics under the control of English civil authorities forced Joan of Arc to a death by fire. I have also written about how a pope and the Inquisition helped clear her name in a trial a generation later. The facts surrounding these cases are known because scribes recorded the trials on very sturdy paper, the psychos of the French Revolution and the thieving Nazis in World War Two didn’t locate them, and the French didn’t have an internal traitor like Clintonite Sandy Berger available to destroy those records in their national archives.
Our own state and national archives have many letters, government official reports, and other documents that show how life was in earlier times.
A Detroit News article about black history professor Henry Louis Gates let him discuss how he uses archival records to track down the ancestry of famous people. Gates is an expert on black genealogy, which is a challenge to many because most blacks have slaves in their family trees, and thus fewer public records than most whites in the era when slavery was allowed in this nation. However, people without computers kept records of people in America, and Gates finds them in state and federal archives and uses them like a detective would do in a missing persons search to astonish celebs on the TV shows he has hosted. (99 and I find Dr. Gates scholarly and entertaining at the same time, even though we disagree with his politics.)
I used immigration archives and the archives of federal laws to write two history books about the Ellis Island era of immigration. I was able to explain how immigration laws changed, how we used to screen immigrants, how our agents fought white slavery (girl trafficking), and how they tried to ensure only immigrants who were worthwhile to America would be allowed into the nation. Our policy was Ellis Island then, and the Deep State wants it to be Gilligan’s Island now. I also interviewed experts when I ran into anomalies, I found many newspaper articles that covered Ellis Island and immigration back in the day, and I had my manuscripts reviewed by subject experts at the Ellis Island National Immigration Museum to ensure accuracy. But I couldn’t have done as good a job without the archives.
These are public records your money pays for to maintain.
This is why it was so tragic that federal government knuckleheads destroyed the records of millions of Army veterans by dereliction or design.
The National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis used to help people find military records. But they are overwhelmed and often not very helpful. Changes in policy over the years forbid access to military personnel records of those who left the Service 60 or fewer years ago, unless the seeker of these records is the veteran or a family member of the veteran.
Colonel Jimmy Stewart on the Phone in Dad’s Hardware Store, Indiana, PA
“His was a Wonderful Life”
Government incompetence led to a fire in 1973 that destroyed most of the records of U.S. Army veterans in World War One, World War Two, and the “police actions” in Korea and Vietnam. There was no fire suppression system in the building, and allegedly some federal payroller discarded a lit cigarette carelessly, which allegedly started the blaze.
Since then, government agents have exploited that fire to deny benefits to many veterans. “There’s no record you (or your father) served,” these vermin tell people. The feds don’t often deny freebies to illegals, however.
If you need to find records for yourself from this era (or if you need to do it for a loved one), contact the Veterans of Foreign Wars or private military records searchers. Or confront the Veterans Administration and demand they find records of the money they paid the veteran while he was in the service. These and other military records of Army vets of that era did not go up in smoke. Your congressman’s staffers might be of help if they served in the military, and care about constituent services.
Likewise with other military records. A private firm whose people specialize in military records searches will be quicker, more thorough, and often less expensive than government people. They don’t have a bias against the men and women who served when their nation called them.
These private military records searchers can locate military records on many people even if their personnel files are off limits. Unit reports list members of units. And there are other obscure records these people know about that can lead to info on your veteran.
Some former servicemen filed their discharge papers at their county courthouses. You can check these for data on a former serviceman (or woman). Another thing you can do is check newspaper records. Newspapers used to report news on Service members, even when most of the country’s young men were in the Service.
People remember their heroes. There are numerous monuments to Washington and Lincoln, and to the officers and men who served this great nation.
Some are under attack because leftists hate Christianity, Columbus, and Confederates. And this Veterans Day, even U.S. Grant, who beat the Confederates, is under attack by leftists in New York City, where he and his wife are buried, because he was a man and a patriot.
My ancestors fought for the Union, as I noted above. But most monuments to Rebel soldiers in Southern states do not offend me.
Here’s why:
North Carolina’s Silent Sam and other statues which show the average Rebel soldier are accurate reflections of the heroism of the Southerners in the Civil War. More than half the white men in the states of the Confederacy – about 1.5 million men – served in its rebellious army. Those statues represent Everyman in those states – virtually none of them were slaveowners – who left family and home and served in a war the evil and dumb politicians of those states started. The bravery of the average Southerner accounts for why the Civil War lasted so long. My ancestors in blue and about 2.8 million other Union soldiers needed four years to put them down.
An Army buddy of mine and I were stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in the late 1970s. We rolled out one January Saturday to Fort Donelson, the site of one of Grant’s early victories, just over the state line in Tennessee. His ancestors wore gray. We saw the little soldiers’ cemetery was strewn with debris, so we cleaned it up. To honor his people and my people and other folks’ people, Americans all.
Re-enactments of Civil War battles and the Old West are heritage, not hatred. The Yanks (including 200,000 blacks in uniform) and Rebs and cowboys and Indians and Buffalo Soldiers were tough.
Leftists say the Rebs fought the US Government. That is true. So did the American Indians and the Mexicans. We shouldn’t knock down their memorials either.
In fact, 99 and I drove a short distance last weekend to Vincennes, Indiana for a re-enactment featuring the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. In the Ohio Valley, where we live, Tecumseh is huge …. so huge that General Sherman’s parents named him after the great war chief.
The Ohio Valley also boasts of U.S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and the man they both admired – Zachary Taylor. It also boasts of William Henry Harrison.
People say Harrison wasn’t much because he died a month after becoming President. If only the Bushes, the Clintons, and Obama had done something similar! But I digress.
Harrison came up big in the War of 1812 in the Midwest like Andrew Jackson did in the South. Both men inflicted defeats on the British. Harrison’s men killed Tecumseh in battle in 1813 (after Oliver Perry and his sailors beat the British at Put-in Bay in Lake Erie) while invading Ontario and killing the British who attacked Americans. The great Zachary Taylor served under Harrison.
Tecumseh (leading) and the Shawnee at Vincennes — by author
So why Tecumseh and why Vincennes?
Vincennes is a town the French built before the French and Indian War. It sits on the Wabash River, across from downstate Illinois. Before the steamboat, American Indians and French fur traders would go from Lake Erie to the Maumee River at present-day Toledo, Ohio, then paddle up the Maumee River into present-day Indiana, carry their canoes several miles, then put them in the Wabash River and paddle to the Ohio River near present-day Evansville, Indiana. Vincennes was a good site for a trading post.
The British took the little town and put a fort there. French settlers helped American George Rogers Clark and his men take the fort from the British during the winter of 1779.
We think of the French as being soft, but the French in America and Canada were hardy. Some of Napoleon’s best soldiers settled in America after the Napoleonic Wars. And the descendants of the French in Louisiana and those in Canada who were exiled to Louisiana, the Cajuns, are as tough a people as any in this nation. The Cajuns hunt gators and eat snakes and routinely save people after hurricanes and floods. I want them on my side in any scrap.
After the Revolutionary War, the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the east side of Minnesota were in the Northwest Territory. Ohio became a state in 1803. William Henry Harrison, the governor of what was left of the Northwest Territory, used Vincennes as his home base because it was central to the American population of the land, mostly in southern Indiana and southern Illinois. The British were violating American sovereignty by clandestinely posting soldiers on American soil in the Midwest, and by openly giving American Indians firearms and gunpowder. Harrison had to put this to a halt.
Harrison’s adversary was Tecumseh. Politically correct history books won’t say so, but American Indian tribes warred upon each other with great cruelty. The Iroquois in particular were bloodthirsty. Of course the Aztecs were truly demonic, which explains why the weaker Mexican Indian tribes all helped the Spanish against them. Archaeologists found a million or so skulls and skeletons of those the Aztecs ritually murdered, so the politically correct can’t lie about this.
Tecumseh, a Shawnee, saw American whites as a greater threat to his tribe than other tribes. He knew the British also coveted American Indian land, but there were fewer settlers who were British. So he sought British weapons, and tried to forge the various tribes into a union against American whites. This was a great strategy on his part.
Harrison was not pleased. So in 1810 he sent out word for Tecumseh to show up in Vincennes and give an account of himself. Tecumseh and some warriors came under a flag of truce, but he would not enter Harrison’s home in Vincennes. He suspected a trap. So he parleyed with Harrison in front of Harrison’s house. (The house, called “Grouseland,” was a large brick building with a basement, an armory, and a well, that was built like a small fort. In case of an American Indian or British raid, the people of the town could shelter at the place and defend themselves.)
Tecumseh came in force. An American who understood Shawnee alerted Harrison that Tecumseh was signaling his braves to attack. American officers drew weapons on Tecumseh. The warriors decided to leave to preserve Tecumseh’s life as their best war chief, and strike another time.
Tecumseh wised up. When Harrison summoned him again in 1811, Tecumseh acted peacefully to lull Harrison. He then stealthfully went on a recruiting trip to nearby Indian villages to bring other tribes into his confederation. Harrison found out somehow and decided to strike the largest American Indian settlement in the area to throw the tribes into disarray. This settlement, Tippecanoe, was near where Purdue University stands today, in northwestern Indiana. Harrison and his men beat the Shawnee and their allies, and destroyed their food supply just before the oncoming winter in November 1811. Zachary Taylor and a handful of men held off Tecumseh and his men when they tried to capture and burn Fort Harrison, in the area of today’s Terre Haute, Indiana.
The young man who portrayed Tecumseh was magnificent. And the older gentleman who portrayed Harrison did well also. Harrison was a younger man, actually, and the real Tecumseh was a taller man than the man who portrayed him, but both re-enactors did well in showing the tensions between the great war chief and the crafty American leader who opposed him.
Everyman and Everywoman, War of 1812, Indiana Frontier — by author
The re-enactors posing as American troops and French settlers skirmished against American Indian re-enactors in the woods around the site of Fort Knox II, north and west of Vincennes, on a hill that dominates the Wabash River. After the day’s events, “Tecumseh” sold history books and “Governor Harrison” calligraphied papers and articles for the tourists. They sat side by side in a small tent and greeted those of us who came out to see them.
Skirmishes on the frontier were not Gettysburg or D-Day. But people lost their lives in these as well. The men (and not a few women) on both sides of the American Indian wars were fighting for their ways of lives and should be remembered.
After the re-enactment, 99 and I then went to St. Francis Xavier Church, the old country cathedral, in Vincennes and made a visit to the crypt while a wedding was just starting in the church above. Four bishops for Indiana, all from France, are buried in the crypt, and religious art and sculptures stand as tokens of the French settlers’ devotion to Christ, the saints, Mary, and their clergy. A remembrance of a macabre but totally respectful European practice marked the people’s giving honor to St. Aufidia, a Latin girl, as she witnessed to the Faith at the cost of her life. She died, a martyr, a victim of the Romans. Her bone fragments, on display on a red velvet stand in the crypt, are a stark reminder of what it cost some to witness to the living God.
As we quietly left the church, we felt the energy and joy of a church full of people celebrating the wedding of a young man and a young woman, and praying for their success in marriage. What a blessing!
One last word on remembrance. I flipped from a cop show Wednesday night and saw Carrie Underwood singing the great Protestant hymn “Softly and Tenderly.” She was in white and the backdrop was midnight blue. On a screen the projectionist showed pictures of the victims of the shooters who murdered about 60 people at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas. Carrie gave a powerful and moving performance, a true use of the gifts God has given her.
Carrie Underwood and the Victims of the Las Vegas Murderers — Courtesy of 2017 Country Music Awards
The media pukes have already written off the victims as unworthy rednecks and Trump supporters. Of course the media are ignorant of the fact the great Merle Haggard was a liberal, and that Johnny Cash worked for prison reform. Since country music fans by and large love the country and are a little leery of Heather having Two Mommies, they are targets for media scorn.
The dirty cops of the FBI are also hoping we don’t remember what happened in Vegas. The FBI people in charge out there are following the lead of James Comey and Robert Mueller, who are Adams Apple deep in facilitating the ongoing crimes of the Clintons and others in the Deep State. And sadly, they seem to be following the lead of the Justice Department, who provided firearms as a sort of foreign aid package or welfare package to “needy” Mexican drug gangs.
An agency whose people decided to cover up the murder of a president, John Kennedy – a war hero and veteran — will stoop to anything.
Many country music stars and execs may indulge in adultery and substance abuse like other entertainers. But country entertainers and execs are smart enough to remember their own. This is a lesson NFL execs missed. And it is a lesson that wouldn’t sink in for other forms of entertainment because the entertainers and execs are objectively disordered. Or maybe when the lesson was being taught, they were in the transgender bathroom.
On this Veterans Day, remember your own heroes, and the other heroes who gave time and blood to the preservation of this great nation. All gave some; some gave all.
Pray for those in uniform now, those veterans struggling with their health, and for those widows (and a few widowers) and orphans whose loved ones have been taken from them while in service to the country.
And pray for the repose of those veterans and their loved ones who have gone before us.
Don’t let them be forgotten.
Except for the direct intervention of God, an informed and armed and aggressive public is the best guarantee of liberty.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
Info on the military records fire and the subsequent abuses by the feds in denying veterans benefits comes from a 6/8/2014 article by Cristina Corbin for Fox News.
Info on Dr. Gates comes from a 9/22/2014 Detroit Free Press article.
