Heavy artillery roadblock4/20/2023 Our records request was for a sailor born in October of 1900, not October of 1899 which the federal government insists as his year of birth (after all, that's the information they have on his enlistment papers) contrary to the Clark County (Ohio) Bureau of Vital Statistics. Upon Andrew's 17th birthday in October of 1917, four months after the United States' entry into WW1, he enlisted with the Navy telling the recruiters he was 18 years of age. Andrew's mother died in 1911, his father early in 1917. Our next roadblock, courtesy of St Louis, was conflicting D.O.B. ![]() What is this, the 18th century? Tony helped us with the request (a much more complex form than anyone might expect) and asked us to return when we received Andrew's records. No, we had to submit our request in writing. service officer would suffice, no imagined (by me) threat of a Quantico-directed military raid would sway the archives. Our request for information had to be made in writing no phone call on our behalf from a V.A. Of course, this being the federal bureaucracy, there were complicating factors. When we were unable to provide Andrew's service number (our second roadblock I'm not sure who, when Andrew was living, would have known that information, let alone his few remaining descendants 90 years later), the serviceman at Quantico volunteered an alternate route for us which, as he correctly asserted, would ultimately resolve our matter contacting the service records archive at a top secret location in St Louis, Mizzou. Officer Leatherneck at Quantico was, unsurprisingly, much more helpful. You might think the federal government would understand this was an impossibility as Andrew died 10 years before the advent of Social Security. Our first bureaucratic roadblock, we were required to provide Andrew's Social Security number. Tony understood this was an important cause for us but also, as a veteran himself, this was an important task for him as well - t ime and again Tony verbalized his strong feelings about the importance of honoring our heroic dead - and he fought like a tiger to accomplish our shared goal. At all times Tony conducted himself in a professional and respectful way, but we could sense his growing frustration as events wore on. Immediately Tony, and we, ran headlong into bureaucratic resistance. and to Quantico - always on speaker-phone so that there would be no mysteries as to the process. With us present, he placed phone calls to Washington D.C. Himself a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, he was both sensitive and enthusiastic about helping our cause in every way conceivable. ![]() Our service officer at the V.A., Tony Johnson, is a helluva guy. ![]() This discovery initiated a protracted process by which we subsequently made several trips to the V.A. As such, we cannot be certain as to what caused the damage but it was, of course, very old and was made of soft, weather-worn marble. Andrew is buried in one of Springfield's active cemeteries, one which has fortunately had little or no incidents of vandalism over the years. While on a routine genealogical research mission to Springfield early last year (2012), we discovered that his upright government-issued grave marker (grave markers are provided by the government for its veterans) had been broken off at its base.
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