Meanwhile, I've been working on the new website, and have made a lot of progress with the biographies section. My goal is to have a page for each Marine who served in Able at any point, and while for some that just means a name, a hometown, or a brief description of what they did or where they were wounded, I hope it'll make each individual a little more real to readers. I've been tearing up Ancestry.com and other sites, and once you figure out how to do searches intuitively on there, it's an even better resource than before. (I am STILL waiting for them to put up the muster rolls for the Corps from 1941-1945 - I know they have the material and the permission of the Corps to post them, and while I know it has to be a HUGE task - please please please hurry up! I can't make it back down to the Archives any time soon!)
An unexpected side benefit of the searches is that I have located some veterans who may still be alive. After a slough of cross-checking various sources (one of the few skills I can definitively say I took away from my last job at the staffing agency), I came up with possible addresses for:
Peteus Staeyert: a four-campaign veteran who ended up as a corporal in charge of a squad on Iwo.
James Jackson: another corporal, wounded twice - once on Saipan and once on Iwo Jima.
Donald Hart: rose from PFC to Sergeant in command of a squad; also a twice-wounded four campaign veteran.Herman Schwabl: joined Able right after Saipan, fought on Tinian and Iwo Jima.
Herbert Voncalio: a machine gunner who joined before Iwo Jima and fought there until wounded at the very end of the campaign.
I also finally got to send a letter to Robert Williams, a friend of George's who lives in Pennsylvania.Here's hoping they write back!
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