Ohio and World War II

Between December 1, 1941 and December 31, 1946, over 16.1 million personnel served in the U.S armed forces. Of that number, approximately 893,000 came from the Buckeye state and served their country during World War II. Between 1,000 and 1,500 World War II veterans die each day in this country. To keep their stories from dying with them, the PBS stations in Ohio, in conjunction with the Ohio Humanities Council, have banded together to form the Ohio War Stories Program. Veterans and civilians who lived through the war years are encouraged to contribute pictures, videos or write a blog about their wartime experiences.

You must register to submit material, but registration is not necessary to view the contributions made to the Web site, http://www.ohiowarstories.org/?q=node/2. 

Some examples of stories already submitted: 

1. Wendy Cochrane in a video called, “About My Parents,” shares the story of how her British mother and her American father met while her father served in England.

2. Read about Mildred Gillars (Axis Sally) and her Ohio background in the post, “Ohio's Connection with Axis Sally.”

3. There were four German P.O.W. camps in the state of Ohio during the War. Scott Trostel writes about these in “Ohio's German P.O.W. Camps.” 

4. In the video, “George H. Snyder, Jr.: P.O.W,” George talks about his time spent as a P.O.W. in Europe and his first day in battle. 

5. Bill Ruth's video talks about the sites he witnessed in liberating a German concentration camp in a video called, “Bill Ruth, Dachau Witness.” 

6. “Saipan Fear” is the image of a Japanese postcard depicting Pearl Harbor and the blog that accompanies that image.

7. In “The Day That Changed Everything” by Alberta L. Montgomery, she writes her story as a young wife experiencing the news of Pearl Harbor

 8. Christopher Purdy submitted a series of letters written by his father while he served in the US Army. The title of his post is “War letters.”

These and other stories can be found at The Ohio War Stories Web site at http://www.ohiowarstories.org/?q=node/2. 

Until Next Time — Happy Ancestral Digging! 

Note this post first published online, October 12, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

©12 October 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

For National Family History Month — One Definition of Family

For someone who professes a great interest in family history, I have dragged my heels on mentioning the fact that October has been designated as National Family History Month. As I mentally planned this post, I intended to link you to some terrific ideas on how to celebrate the month. 

 Instead, I find myself squirming about writing on the subject. Preferring instead to put the laptop down, and go foraging for something to eat, or something interesting to read. Or, when I finally make myself sit with laptop in hand, I suddenly feel the need to find spoilers for “Grey's Anatomy,” or a good recipe for crock-pot Chili or googling about any errant thought that flitters through my brain — anything but actually writing this post. 

 The sticking point for me is I'm suddenly self-conscious about the definition of family. If human beings conducted their lives in a nice orderly fashion, and if we all lived to be ninety the concept of family would be easy. But we don't. We sometimes die in automobile accidents, or get cancer, or we find the love of our life isn't, or we somehow derail a perfectly good life for liquor or drugs or lust. I'm not making judgments; I'm stating that human beings lead messy lives. And these messy lives have consequences, one of which is that the definition of family gets bruised and muddied. 

 Is a favored uncle by marriage who died more than 40 years ago, still part of my family? Is the Aunt of my youth, no longer married to my biological Uncle still my Aunt? The grade school project of making a family tree seems innocent and straight forward, unless you happen to be an adopted child, or a foster child, or child of a blended family. What tree does that child make? What genealogical chain does he follow? What family history should she celebrate? 

 Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, author of “The Family of Adoption,” talks instead of a family tree, a family orchard that includes as many trees as necessary for an individual's identity. The concept allows for both biology and reality, for inclusion of nature and nurture. In my family, it allows the man who adopted my grandfather when he was 10, and whose last name I carried until I married, to be recognized and honored in our family orchard. It allows my orchard to include four beautiful grandchildren for whom I am not grandmother by blood, but rather grandmother by heart. It is a concept I embrace. 

Until Next Time — Happy Ancestral Digging! Note this post first published online, October 11, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

© 11 October 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

Before there was West Nile Virus there was Ague Fever

Note: My great-great-great-grandparents, Joseph and Magdalena Good, came from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Liberty Township in Seneca County in the early summer of 1831. They purchased 160 acres of land just outside of what would later become the village of Bettsville. Ague Fever (rhymes with Nixon's disgraced VP, Agnew) or Malaria as we call it today, was a disease common to all those who lived in the area known as The Black Swamp. Anopheles quadrimaculatus, the species of mosquito that carries the disease, is one of approximately sixty species of mosquito that still inhabits this region today. (The Anopheles quadrimaculatus does not carry the West Nile Virus.)

The Good family wagon would have lumbered along, through the growing town of Tiffin, on its way to “their” land in Liberty Township. They may have noticed grown men bundled up in heavy wool clothing and thought it odd attire for a summer day. How long before someone knowingly asked them, “Have ya got the ague fever, yet?”

Joseph, and certainly Magdalena, must have been dismayed when they saw the soggy wet land where they would start their new life. They would have seen dense thickets of trees and shrub, smelled ripe decaying vegetation. From dusk until morning, hoards of mosquitoes would buzz loudly around the family and their livestock. At least one book records the death of a small child bitten by mosquitoes in nearby Scott Township of Sandusky County. Was the Good family wise enough to keep smudge pots going at night to drive the mosquitoes away?

A female mosquito that had bitten one of the “old timers” a couple of weeks before and had ingested his blood, probably had not noticed the fever and the chills in the man. All the mosquito cared about was getting the vital protein in the blood that allowed her to lay the optimum number of eggs. She was following an age-old instinct of survival of her species. Nor would she care that the blood she ingested carried along with the needed amino acid, a protozoan that was causing the illness in the man she had bitten. Once the protozoan had remained inside the mosquito for a week, multiplying and growing, the mosquito would be transferring the parasite when she bit the next individual.

Joseph Good would have appealed to the mosquito only because, he was nearby and he had left an arm or maybe a neck exposed so that she could land, bite him, and suck out just the right amount of blood she needed. Of course, as she bit him, she would be transferring saliva into the open wound. The saliva contained a chemical that kept the wound from clotting. It also contained the protozoa that caused malaria. Joseph would have noticed the itch from the bite, the red mark on his skin, but he would not connect the symptoms that would eventually follow.

The protozoa laced saliva of the mosquito would have traveled to his liver, where it found the right conditions to grow and multiply. Sometime between 8 days and several months after the mosquito's bite, the parasites would leave the liver and enter Joseph's red blood cells. There they would grow and multiply still more, bursting the red blood cells as they grew, attacking still more red blood cells, all the while releasing toxins into Joseph's blood.

It would be at this point Joseph would start to feel ill. He would have severe chills and shakes, and would understand why a man would put on woolens on a hot summer day. Then there would be the high fever and headache, as well as an overwhelming fatigue accompanied by muscle aches, nausea and possibly diarrhea. From the destruction of his red blood cells, Joseph would become pale or possibly jaundiced. Any mosquitoes biting Joseph now would also ingest the parasite, allowing the cycle to continue.

Joseph and the rest of the settlers thought this terrible fever came from inhaling the “bad air” of The Black Swamp. The discovery that a protozoan in the blood caused the disease and that the lowly mosquito was responsible for transmission, would not be made until the late 19th century.

Though the relationship of mosquitoes to the disease would be unknown for more than another half century, the settlers did realize that there was a cycle to the disease. It would first strike during the warmth of late spring, peak with the humid hot days of summer, and taper off after the first crisp fall day.

When the disease was at its peak, “work schedules were fixed to accommodate the fits. The justice arranged the docket to avoid the sick day of the litigant; the minister made his appointments in keeping with the shakes; the housewife hurried through her morning chores, then sat down to await her visitor; and the sparking swain reckoned the ager schedule of self and intended. Neither a wedding in the family nor a birth or death would stop the shakes,” this according to the book “The Midwest Pioneer: His Ills, Cures & Doctors,” by Picard and Buley. Livestock went unattended when whole families became bedridden with the illness.

Almost as bad as the disease itself, were the cures that the local doctors prescribed for their hapless patients. Bloodletting was a common practice along with such diverse cures as opium, spider's web, the bark of a horse chestnut and even arsenic in conjunction with the bark of cinchona. (Quinine, the traditional cure, is a derivative of the bark of the cinchona tree.)

All this was part of the daily life of the Northwestern Ohio family. A reduced supply of stagnant water due to ditch laws enacted in the 1850s, created a reduction in the number of mosquitoes’ eggs. The fewer supply of mosquitoes interacting with the human hosts, disrupted the multiplication of the parasite, which put an end to malaria as a common illness for local inhabitants.

The first few decades that Joseph and Magdalena spent in Seneca County, however, would have found the family along with those of their neighbors plagued with malaria. It was just a part of daily life that had to be endured.

Until Next Time — Happy Ancestral Digging!

Note this post first published online, October 10, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

© 10 October 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

Sandusky County Civil War Soldiers Database

Before anybody begins to accuse me of being obsessed with the topic of the Civil War, I promise this will be the last blog on the subject, at least for a while. I had forgotten one very important local source of Civil War data — the Sandusky County, Ohio, Civil War Soldiers Database housed on the Hayes Presidential Center's Web site.

According to the Web site, a Bowling Green State University student, Richard L. Manion started the project as part of his thesis research in 1989. The project was continued by the Curator of Manuscripts at the Hayes Presidential Center, Nan Card. More than 60 sources were used to complete the database. If your family has lived in Sandusky County for at least the last 150 years, you should check out this resource. The records indicate that more than 65% of all military-aged men in Sandusky County did service for their country at some point during the Civil War.

Andrew Zink, for example, is one of the men listed from 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. From the database, we learn that he was 18 when he enlisted on March 31, 1864. He lived in Sandusky Township of Sandusky County. He enlisted as a private and was a private when he was captured June 11, 1864 in Ripley, Mississippi. He died October 21, 1864 in Andersonville prison.

To read more about the history of the database and to search for your own Civil War ancestors, go to http://www.rbhayes.org/hayes/databases/soldiers/soldiers.htm.

Until Next Time — Happy Ancestral Digging! Note this post first published online, October 9, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

@ 9 October 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

Field Trip — The Hayes Presidential Center's Civil War Encampment

Though the Civil War Encampment at the Hayes Presidential Center has been going on for 16 years, I have never attended. This year, I put the encampment on my “must do” list. My old faithful Sony digital and I went to Spiegel Grove to check things out. Sights, Sounds and Thoughts from the Encampment:

1. A” Confederate” woman from the Cleveland area spoke to me about how the unusually hot weather had sapped all the energy right out of the reenactors. Her ninth year in attendance of this event, she said normally they all kept busy in order to stay warm — but not this year.

2. A few moments spent chatting with a budding blacksmith who talked with me about learning this new trade. He had tried making soap for one season, but didn't care for that. He said the idea of blacksmithing came to him in a dream. Oh unconscious mind, what a devil you can be. He told me he enjoyed his newfound passion — even on such a hot day.

3. Two preteen girls dressed in Civil War-era attire, chatted about completing a treasure hunt — they were looking for President Hayes' birth date (or death date — eavesdropping has its limitations) and decided Hayes' tomb would be a good place to check.

4. Tents pitched everywhere. Located across the trail from Hayes' Tomb was the Union Camp while the Confederate Camp was stationed along Hayes Avenue on the western end of the Spiegel Grove grounds.

5. A curl of steam seen rising from a tin coffee boiler sitting unattended in front of one tent site. For some reason, the sight affected me — I could easily imagine the same scene over one hundred 45 years earlier. I tried capturing the feeling in a picture, but it lost something in the translation.

6. The dichotomy of seeing a woman costumed in Victorian Era dress taking a quick swig of bottled water.

7. Sutlers Row, a lengthy stretch of walk way lined with vendors' tents connected the Union and Confederate Camps. My hunch is the tent selling cold drinks saw the most action during the two-day encampment.

8. Yankee reenactors drilling in front of the Hayes home. Hmm — did I see a female reenactor among their ranks? Maybe I need new glasses. If not, good for her!


9. I overheard a conversation from a Confederate enthusiast to some bystanders concerning the real truth versus what was being taught in history books. Sigh … I wish I had walked over sooner so I would know what truth and what the history books have been incorrectly written.

10. “Fire in the Hole” yelled as a group of rebel reenactors fired their cannon. Though prepared, I jumped and lost the picture of them firing that I had planned on taking.

11. The absolute look of rapture on a young boy's face as he sat perched atop his father's shoulders. Still holding his hands over his ears, he couldn't take his eyes off the cannon, hoping the men would fire it again.

I've already decided the lantern tour of the soldier's campsites is something I want to have on my “to do list” for next year's encampment.

Until Next Time — Happy Ancestral Digging

Note this post first published online, October 8, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

© 8 Oct 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

Some Civil War Facts

In honor of this weekend's Civil War Encampment at the Hayes Presidential Center's grounds, I thought I would share a few related facts. 

1. Ohio sent 313,180 to fight for the Union Cause. 

2. Only New York and Pennsylvania furnished more men to the Grand Army of the Republic than Ohio.

3. More Ohioans died from disease than were killed in battle. (19,365 died of disease and another 11,588 were killed or mortally wounded.) 

4. The deadliest disease for the Union Army (with more than 44,500 deaths) was diarrhea. 

5. The Union enacted a draft on March 3, 1863 for men between the ages of 18 and 45. Each state was given a quota of troops to fulfill. If the number of volunteers was sufficient to meet the quota then no one was drafted.

6. The Confederacy's first draft law was enacted on April 16, 1862, called the Conscription Act. All healthy white men between the ages of 18 and 35 for a three-year term of service. 

7. In September of 1862 the age limit was raised to 45 in the Confederate States 

8. In February of 1864, the Confederacy again extended the age range from 17 to 50.

9. The state where the most battles were fought was the state of Virginia, which was the site of 2,154 battles.

10. Approximately 30,000 Union soldiers died in Confederate prisons. 

11. Approximately 26,000 Confederate soldiers died in Union prisons. 

12. The 72 Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry was organized in Fremont in the fall of 1861. 900 men left for Camp Chase on January 24, 1862. The following are those from the Regiment who died in Andersonville Prison.

Pvt. Alexander Almond 

Sgt. William Baumgartner 

Pvt. Simeon Blackman 

Pvt. Michael Burns

Pvt. Patrick Donohue 

Pvt. Eugene Frankenberg 

Pvt. John Gullenback

1st Sgt. Daniel I. Haggerty 

Cpl. Niles S. Haines

Pvt. William Hinton 

Pvt. Owen Hudnell 

Cpl. Edwin L. Hyde 

Sgt. Sherman A. Jackson

Pvt. Robert Kelvington 

Cpl. Martin S. Lochner 

Pvt. George W. Lowe

Pvt. Noble Perrin 

Cpl. Henry J. Potter 

Pvt. John Purcell 

Pvt. John H. Ross

Pvt. Conrad Sheller

Pvt. Henry Shook

Pvt. Platt Soper

Pvt. Solomon Stage 

Pvt. Martin J. Staner 

Cpl. Ferdinand Statler

Pvt. Warren Sturtevant

Pvt. Michael Weaver

Pvt. Luther Wentworth 

Pvt. Eli Whitaker 

Cpl. Andrew J. Zink

13. By 1864, Andersonville housed 33,000 prisoners. It was the fifth largest city in the South. 

14. The last battle of the Civil War took place at Palmito Ranch, Texas on May 13, 1865 — a month after Lee's surrender. The Confederate side won the encounter. 

Until Next Time … 

Note: Facts and Statistics were taken from the following Web sites: CJ's Civil War Home Page: (He lists his source as Atlas Editions; Civil War Cards) Shotgun's Home of the Civil War: The Civil War Home Page: http://www.civil-war.net/ http://www.udata.com/users/hsbaker/ohio72.htm PBS's The Civil War: Note this post first published online, October 5, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

©5 Oct 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder 

Happy Birthday

For many reasons, October 4 is a date of note in my family. The most important reason being that it is my dad's birthday. Dad is half of a dynamic duo that gave my three siblings and me the best of all childhoods. Dad and I didn't meet until I was four months old. He was serving as a supply sergeant in Japan when I was born. But he was there when all three of my younger siblings came screamin' into this world. 

He was the one who had to tell mom that the doctors didn't think they would be taking my baby brother home, probably the hardest thing he ever had to tell her. My mother, discharged from the hospital, had to leave her precious newborn behind and it fell to my father to go to the hospital every morning to see my brother and find out how he was doing. Dad did this every day until my brother finally came home.

As a kid, my dad would sometimes take me with him when he went golfing. It wasn't that I liked golf (heavens no), or the great outdoors, or even the fact that most of the time I could weasel an orange soda pop out of dad at the end of nine holes. No, what I liked about walking alongside him hole after hole was that I had my dad ALL TO MYSELF. Sometimes we walked silently and just enjoyed the day, and sometimes, poor dad was subjected to 50 million questions — I don't know how he ever concentrated on his game! 

Besides being a golf fanatic, Dad is also an avid sports fan, and a big Ohio State supporter. He was horrified to learn that his one and only granddaughter was a Michigan enthusiast. He said of her devotion to Michigan, that it was like “being at war with Russia, and she was on the side of the Russians!” Yep, he's a real Buckeye fan and 20 some years later, my daughter still supports the Maize and Blue. Russians indeed! 

My Dad called the 2000 election way before the issue of “hanging chads” was resolved. At my nephew's wedding in November of that year, my dad asked me if I had heard the news that Bush had been declared the winner in the presidential election. He said it with such earnestness that I didn't doubt him for a second. My mistake — I spent the rest of the evening talking about Bush being President Elect with everyone I entered into the most casual of conversations. It wasn't until the end of the night, that I realized my dad had pranked me. To this day, his defense is that he was just early in his forecast of what eventually happened. So what if his eldest daughter looked like an idiot. 

The truth of the matter is that in my family, we joke a lot, and consequently we laugh a lot, tell stories a lot, and are noisy a lot. A newcomer has to have a strong constitution to face one of our big family gatherings. But in spite of all that or maybe because of it, we also love a lot. That's what my father and my mother taught us. As my Dad always says, “It's the little things.” So here's to you, daddy — HAPPY 76TH BIRTHDAY! 

Until Next Time … Note this post first published online, October 4, 2007, at Desktop Genealogist Blog at The News-Messenger Online http://www.thenews-messenger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=BLOGS02

©4 Oct 2007, Desktop Genealogist Unplugged, Teresa L. Snyder