Speak My Name

“As long as you speak my name, I shall live forever.” – African proverb

Genealogy is one of my hobbies. I was working on family history long before ancestry websites existed, even before the internet existed. I started when the US Mail, the county clerk, and older relatives were the only resources. I’ve always been intrigued by my dead relatives.

Technology has forced hobbyists like me to step up our game. It’s a whole new ancestral universe. But there are a lot of incredible tools that come along with it. Some helpful actors on the genealogical stage are podcasts. They provide guidance and innovative ideas to expand our family trees.

One podcast opened my eyes to a way to merge two of my pursuits: genealogy and writing. I heard a man named Don Milne interviewed on my favorite genealogy podcast. He is the founder of Stories Behind the Stars, a movement to document the lives of the men and women killed in World War II. In 2016, the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack was on the horizon. Milne, a lifelong connoisseur of all things World War II, noticed that although those who perished in the attack were acknowledged, it ended there. He wondered if there wasn’t more information on those lost.

Milne turned to the internet and found more than enough to begin to develop biographies on the WWII fallen. He started by finding one person per day on what would be their 100th birthday and writing a profile for that person. Not just how they died, but also how they lived. He put his sights on 2020, the 75th anniversary of the end of the war and committed to writing one a day until then.

Milne built on his project by developing a blog and a Facebook group to showcase the stories. It didn’t take long before more than 3,000 people per day were reading the biographies. He hit the million mark at 18 months. Two followers of his blog soon stepped up and offered to write the stories as well.

When Milne announced he would be concluding the project in September 2020 as planned, the consensus was that it should continue. Embracing the concept “many hands make light work”, he began to recruit volunteers, and the non-profit organization Stories Behind the Stars (STARS) https://www.storiesbehindthestars.org was established in February 2020.

My father was a WWII veteran, a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, so I am also drawn to the stories. I applied to be a volunteer writer and participated in the STARS online “boot camp” training. The next step was to submit a story for review. Although my father returned from combat, my mother’s cousin Forrest McGrew did not. He was killed in September 1944 in the liberation of Belgium. I picked Forrest for my first biography, and it was accepted.

Forrest and my parents hailed from a small Illinois town, approximately 3200 people during the WWII era. Yet, there were 26 men killed from that little community. I made it my goal to write on each of them for STARS. I completed 24 of the 26 stories. (One story was already completed as part of the STARS Pearl Harbor project and one of the men I can't identify.) Once the stories are written and reviewed, they are posted on STARS partners Fold3 https://www.fold3.com and Together We Served https://www.togetherweserved.com historical military websites. These stories will be digitally linked to all war memorials and cemeteries by a smartphone app so visitors can read them.

I have also posted the Abingdon heroes on the Abingdon Illinois Memories group Facebook page. I posted them on the anniversary of their loss, along with any pictures I found. The response was amazing. I heard from children and grandchildren of the men and others still touched by their loss. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Since Forrest, I have contributed 35 stories. There is a formula that somewhat mirrors an obituary, running around 500 words. But even in their brevity, the profiles can be made rich by researching the hero’s family, childhood, and school experiences. Pictures and military records can also be included.

But here’s the thing that blew me away: 421,000 American lives were lost in World War II. That statistic shocked me. It became Don Milne’s goal to write a story for each of them. He hoped to see that done before we lost the last of our WWII vets. At the time of this writing, 64,622 stories had been contributed to Fold3. Amazing but still a far cry from 421,000.

I wrote this to share a different aspect of my writing journey. I also wrote it to encourage people to help reach the goal. A volunteer does not have to be an author or a writer by trade. STARS prepares a volunteer well, and the writer has total input on how often they want to contribute. The cliché of getting back more than you put in certainly applies to this project.

I will continue to contribute. It is a privilege to write about these Americans. It can be emotionally taxing as well. I found a sophomore class picture in my mother’s yearbook with three of the fallen hometown guys standing next to each other. A study in innocence, a trio of 16 year olds with no idea of their fate. Don Milne found it to be a microcosm of our nation. I found that to be true. Fathers, sons and daughters, some with college educations and some who didn’t make it past elementary school. Some immigrants and children of immigrants fighting for their adopted homeland. Most of them not even out of their 20s, some still in their teens.

All heroes.