My Great Great Uncle Russell

Recently I took a trip to the Hillside Cemetery to visit the "family plot" there. I've never been there before - as I've only recently learned that it existed. According to the lady that answered the phone call made before the visit, there were at least eight, possibly nine or more of my ancestors buried there, including my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

When growing up, I didn't see many relatives as my dad was an only child and my mother was born years after her older siblings. The very few aunts, uncles, and cousins that I had, where mostly miles away in California and Massachusetts and out of reach a day or weekend trip.

My grandfather has never spoken much about his parents or grandparents - there was what I'll call the "Great Family Argument of 1930" - an argument that led my grandfather having bitter feelings towards his parents and his parents siblings. This bitterness led to me and my brothers not knowing any of the relatives from my grandfather's side of the family - relatives that actually lived in the neighborhood.

Forgive me for babbling, I'm still trying to mentally digest this.


My great-great-uncle Russell died a few short weeks before I was born. I never knew the man.


I never met his childless, widowed wife, Mary Frances Rhoades either, despite the fact she lived nearby for many years. When I saw saw her grave marker - I saw the veteran flags and no other marker nearby. Puzzled, I figured out from the paperwork the cemetery gave me, that the flags were for her husband Russell - who has no visible gravestone. My great-grandparents and great-great-parents were also missing gravestones. A little troubled by this - I sought to learn why the stones were missing and what I could do about it. Russell, being a wounded, honorably discharged, war veteran, is qualified for a "free" gravestone from the US Government. Where is it and what happened to it?

I felt an inexplicable need to know more about the man - and I'm actually pretty ignorant when it comes to WWI. While searching for information on how the veteran's gravestone business is done, I found his application for a WWI service medal and also learned he had a "Certificate of Wound". From this, I gleaned he served in Machine Gun Company 315 of the 79th Infantry.

The Certificate of Wound was given in WWI - it predates the Purple Heart which was first given in the 1930's. A veteran with such a certificate could send it in and get a Purple Heart later on in the 1940s. Whether my g-g-uncle did this or not, I do not know - there seems to be no on-line listing of Purple Heart recipients (which must number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more).


Anyway, what little I knew of WWI was that the Meuse-Argonne offensive was the last major battle in the war, and that it was fought largely by the Americans - their first and only major combat battle in the war - the defeated Germans signing the Armistice shortly afterward. In just four short months, over 1.25 million Americans saw combat and 10% of them were casualties. 120,000 men were killed or wounded.

My g-g-uncle Russell, a member of the 79th Infantry was involved in this horrible battle.

I looked up Adolph Hitler involvement in WWI as I knew he served in it and had been wounded twice - the last time being blinded by mustard gas in Belgium - so he didn't see any American soldiers or my g-g-uncle Russell.


As horrible as the American losses were in WWI, the British, French, and German losses were far, far worse. War is a brutal way of solving differences. A family squabble can be as brutal to those involved or effected by the fall-out.

I am left mostly wondering two things -

1) Do I have enough energy to tackle the bureaucratic paper form-filling mess that getting a gravestone for Russell will entail?

2) Was my g-g-aunt Mary Frances lonely in her final years, wondering why her nephews never called?