This handsome young man is my Grand-Uncle. I have always been curious about him - He served in the US Army from 1910 to 1914 so he was not in WW1. Perhaps Spanish American, The Mexican Border War, or The Philippines.
It starts out with his birth in 1893, born in Scott County, Tennessee. He's in one census - 1900. I can't find him in any 1910 census. I checked his mother (my great grandmother and his siblings) Only one of them has a 1910 census - the sister who married. I'm thinking, these are country folk - in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee - a fiercely independent bunch. It's quite possible, they just didn't do a census that year - too busy making some good old moonshine!
On Ancestry, information keeps popping up that he was murdered in 1918 in Oklahoma on an Indian Reservation. As I said yesterday, bad information skews the algorithms on Ancestry - When I took the time to go over the 512 family trees that copied this bad information, over and over again - they have no sources, no documentation.
I took it upon myself once again, to search out someone with a name similar to my Grand Uncle and came across a native American with a similar name to his, that was a troublemaker - and finally was whacked on the reservation. It's NOT my Grand Uncle who served in the US Army and he doesn't deserve to have his name trashed or connected to this. I need to prove it though.
My husband tells me I can't fix it - the bad information is just too big for me. But what I can do, is REQUEST from the US National Archives his military records.
https://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records
I admit, without a social security number (they didn't have them at this time) it will be hard for them to locate anything on him. I don't have a birth date only his birth year and even that is questionable. I do have his honorable discharge date - June 1914.
I look into this young man's eyes which were blue according to his enlistment record - and I have to find out or at least do everything I can, within reason.
Knowing how S L O W the government moves - it will no doubt take weeks/months.
Oh my. Even more issues and I would not give up. Once you prove he is not the one who was murdered, you can put up what you know and others will see this. This will be just as popular
ReplyDeleteWell, read my next post which is about this. Genealogy is always fluid, isn't it?
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