The request seemed hard to solve, but I said to myself, I will give it a try.
This is the small story about supporting descendants in their research of artifacts which are left from relatives who fought in the Great War.
In the great forum of the Old Frontline podcast, created in a Discord group by the eminent Great War historian Paul Reed, I saw a question the other evening from a participant in the US.
Among artifacts and souvenirs from his great-grandfather, which was given to him after his grandmother passed away at the age of 103, he found a lot of nice things, but also a ID disc that wasn’t connected to his great-grandfather.
There was a Service number on one side and a name on the other, and as I understood, he had questions about how to find out who this soldier was. Of course I got interested in this as the name looked like a Scandinavian name. Today it is quite hard to find facts only through service numbers, if you don’t know where to look, which can be tricky. It turned out to be tricky for me, even if I see myself to be quite skilled when it comes to digging into the archives. The number and the name below.
The name was Fritz L Anderson, and the service number was 2033597.
In this case I did the most basic search to see if the soldiers were among them who was killed during the war, but it turned out, with the facts from above, that it was no soldier with this name and number in those archives.
I went further on to Ancestry, and found quite many soldiers with this combination, and among those also soldiers who turned out to be born in Sweden, and for me that is hot stuff of course.
I still wasn’t sure about the service number, and I initially found one Fritz Lauritz Anderson, born in Sweden, who I thought could be this individual, who also survived the war. It wasn’t him.
However, I wasn’t satisfied and was quite determined to find archives which contains facts about the service numbers. It turned out that the digital archive, Familysearch, have different data about the American soldiers who were trained and sent to different camps, and also to the War in France.
There was no hit on the number, but I got several hits on the name. the scanned lists were in this case very bad, but with quite sharp eyes I managed to see something very interesting.
It looks like the service number was much longer than the other ones. What did I see? was it 20933597? Could the service number on the ID disc be misprinted? could 2033597 actually be 2093597?
I decided to try more documents with those numbers, as I still didn’t got a hit with the other number.
Finally I found a database within Familysearch, which made it possible to search for service numbers in the Veterans Administration Master Index. It was still hard to search by just numbers, but when I searched with the name once again, I looked through the hits I got, and finally I found the correct number, and the correct individual! Great success!
On the card I also found the date of birth, when he was enlisted, when he was discharged, and when he died.
I used the data above to search on Ancestry, to try to find Fritz Leon Anderson, and there he was. It turned out that he was born in Sweden! I went into the Swedish church books and there he was.
Fritz Leon Andersson was born in Sandarne parish in Gävleborgs county in Sweden, on March 18, 1895. He emigrated to North America in May, 1912. He arrived on June 22nd, 1912, after having passed Liverpool on his journey.
His name is in the Rosters of School for Bakers and Cooks, and I also found facts about the camps he went through during his soldier education.
Fritz died on December 16, 1963, in Cook, Illinois, in the US. I haven’t yet found out where he is buried.
Opened other doors
With my new knowledge about the facts, that I really can find the scanned cards as well in the archive by FamilySearch, which you can’t find on Ancestry. Ancestry only show some text in their similar archive.
I decided to search with the search term “Sweden” in the field of “Place of birth”, but that didn’t result in any hits. Strange. I put “Sweden” in the field named “keyword”, and that resulted in a lot of hits.
By now I know “my” soldiers by name very well from my database, and their names flew by in the list but I also saw names I wanted to investigate further.
I found four more soldiers that I didn’t have in my database, which increased the number from 607 to 611 Swedish born soldiers who fought and fell in the Great War.
I am very glad that I was determined to find the facts about Fritz L Anderson, which led me to new archives and finally to four more names. My friend in the Forum now also know who the ID Disc belonged to. Why it was in the box with all the other artifacts will remain a mystery.
My own quest of finding the Swedish born soldiers who fell in the Great War will continue.
May Fritz Leon Anderson rest in peace.