Valuable History On Local Veterans Found

John Ellingson is a genealogy angel. He happened to be in the right place at the right time and saved a fantastic batch of local genealogical history from a trip to the incinerator.

Thank you, John!

The records he found and saved were several hundred 4- by 6-inch cards of the Veterans Graves Survey, made by the WPA (Works Projects Administration) between 1939 and 1941, under the supervision of local Post 9 of the American Legion.

The cards list veterans names (often with aliases), which war (from the Civil War to the Korean conflict), the names of their spouses or parents, home addresses, birth (often the exact place) and death information, and location of burial in Spokane County. The next of kin is often listed on the back of many cards.

Many veterans were immigrants, and listing their EXACT birthplace is a gold mine.

Several three-ring notebooks came with the cards, containing maps of nearly every Spokane County cemetery, listing which veterans from which wars are buried in which cemeteries.

The Eastern Washington Genealogical Society is excited to have these detailed old records, and plans to make them available to all genealogists researching ancestors in Spokane County.

The first step in the process of making the records available was begun by Doris Woodward, an EWGS member. She compiled a consolidated index of the veterans names, the war they fought in and the cemetery where they are buried. She plans to publish this index in installments in the EWGS Bulletin. It will also be printed and sold as a Spokane County research aid; and the cards will be microfilmed and marketed nationally.

On an alternately snowy and sunny March day, I met with Dean and Connie Clay, Anita Messex and Lorraine Larson to begin the process of double-checking the information in the notebooks and on the cards against the index Doris prepared. We did not quite finish at the end of a full day, but agreed we wanted this index to be as thorough and correct as possible.

The information on the cards, as compiled nearly 40 years ago by the WPA, with help from the American Legion, came from many sources, including existing Legion records, membership lists of the Reno and Sedgewick GAR posts, the McCullough Camp of Confederate Veterans, veterans lists kept by cemeteries, clippings of death and funeral notices in The Spokesman-Review from January 1913 through January 1941, casualty lists appearing in the Soldiers of the Great War (found in the Spokane Public Library), old soldiers homes in Sawtelle, Calif., and Retsil and Orting, Wash., local funeral homes, the Altman-Ruoff Chapter of the DAV, the American Red Cross, service records as recorded in the County Auditors office of Spokane County, and from 750 letters sent to relatives of deceased veterans through the American Legion.

The final tally of this Veterans Graves Survey found 815 World War I and II veterans, 256 Spanish-American veterans, 1,032 Civil War veterans and 41 veterans of other wars (often Indian wars). The lists also reveals 375 veterans were either cremated or their place of burial is not known.

To learn when this database will be available, stay tuned to the activities of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society.

, DataTimes MEMO: Donna Potter Phillips welcomes letters from readers. Write to her at The Spokesman-Review, Features Department, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. For a response, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Donna Potter Phillips The Spokesman-Review