Lest we forget

I received an email from one of the genealogical sites that I subscribe to, revealing that my paternal grandfather, Raymond Dellinger has been drafted for WWI.  This is his draft paper.

I am not 100% sure but I don’t think that he was actually sent to war.  Lucky for him as so many veterans of WWI died of battle wounds and disease.  I was intrigued that he was a bank clerk in Nebraska.  His older sister had married a doctor from Nebraska but the family had previously lived in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico.  My grandfather was born on the Chickasaw nation in OK.

I never had the opportunity to meet this Grandpa and he died when I was a child.  He was so handsome with gray eyes that I would have loved to have seen him in person.  Now I know where the recessive gene for my blue gray eyes comes from.  My father had brown eyes and my mum had blue.

Kerry with dark, dark blue gray eyes

Grandpa Dellinger

As I am looking at the WWI drafts I see that 20 more relatives had been drafted into the war.  I do not know how many actually fought but my great uncle Earl (grandpa’s brother) was a Marine and fought in the Battle of Managua, 1927.  Then an incorrectly spelled name caught my attention, a distant cousin named Tony Ortiga (Ortega).  His draft fell into a strange category of Indians, Insane and Prisoners.  Well, in my family it could be all three….but what awful world categorizes those groups together? It was Folsom Prison in Tony’s case.  I wonder what he did?  Be careful when you open the genealogical closet because you never know what skeleton will fall out.

As I was reading this sad draft, I could hear Johnny Cash playing at Folsom prison.

‘When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry’

Somehow that is the perfect segue from my last post on trains to this one on Memorial Day.

Lest we forget. Rest in Peace.