WW II and Family Roots

Original May 9^th, 2011

WWII has been a point of interest for me in doing research and general studying. Dad was in the Army in WWII, participating in the D-Day invasion. Moving thru France, involved in the battles for Brest, with a story of hanging a flare off the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during a possible alcohol infused celebration. Stories of finding a wine cellar in a bombed out church and wrapping three vintage bottles in a sleeping bag for protection for a long Jeep trip thru bomb craters in the road, while forgetting that he also had his ‘tommy gun’ wrapped in the same sleeping bag. He claimed to have the sweetest smelling sleeping bag in WWII, after picking all the glass out of it. There were lots of such tales, and then there was the others; going onto Omaha off the landing craft and his first sight was half a soldier’s body, running to get cover and away from the sight and coming on to the other half of the body. Walking along with Gen Omar Bradley into concentration camps, dad was assigned to photograph the events; the stories of the sights were things nightmares are made of.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, my dad took me out into the workshop, his hideaway where he did electronic wizardry, taking a old metal box down from a high shelve he had me se\it beside him and he showed me pictures of the concentration camps he snuck home. I can still see those images after almost 50 years. A couple of years later, I asked Dad if I could look thru the images again..he handed them to me, but first told me some were destroyed in a leak the roof had developed. Well, it was the only thing affected and the only images destroyed were of the concentration camps. Ironic?

I also learned the day dad passed away that when he came home from Europe, my Grandfather, Joe Sr., went to the train station in Bangor, brought Dad home to their home on Bayview here in Ellsworth. Dad went right upstairs and never ventured down the stairs for a year and a half.

I now realized how that “leak” happened.

And there was my Uncle; Richard Linscott who I found out just before he passed, was a radio operator on a B-17 Flying Fortress...another story!

These are parts of our lives and those of our relatives that make each genealogy journey a great adventure and feed the hunger of those of us that want to discover how our families dealt with adversities. This is what makes this hobby so great.