The tale of two Frank Smith's in WWI
This was very interesting to work on .. two Frank Smiths in the same area of France during WWI and one of them loses his dog tag ... hint it was NOT my Frank Smith
https://altamontenterprise.com/tags/frank-l-smith
https://altamontenterprise.com/tags/frank-l-smith
A WWI dog tag found in France brings a father into
sharper focus for his daughter
—
Photo by Michel Bahin
This
World War I dog tag
belonging to Frank L. Smith of Voorheesville turned up recently at a flea
market in France.
VOORHEESVILLE — Nearly a hundred
years later, a tangible reminder of Frank L. Smith’s service in France in World
War I has turned up. His dog tag was recently purchased by a Frenchman at a
flea market in a small village that Smith’s unit passed through.
Smith is well known locally as the
founder of the popular tavern and pizzeria in Voorheesville that bears his
name.
Michel Bahin of France is a retired
banker who collects memorabilia from the local battles against Germany in the
First World War, sometimes by buying it and in other cases finding it by
searching in the woods near his home, located near Chateau Thierry. He wrote in
an email to The Enterprise that, in June 1918, soldiers came within two
kilometers (1.25 miles) of his property.
He noted that he has found several
dog tags in the woods before.
Bahin wrote, “Usually it is not
common to find U.S. dog tags, only if the soldier had lost this.”
After purchasing Smith’s tag at a
flea market, Bahin reached out by email to Nancy Cunningham, a descendant of a
different Frank L. Smith, who was also stationed in France during the First
World War.
Cunningham, of Dallas, Texas, is a
librarian and avid genealogist. She maintains a blog about her grandfather’s
military service and the unit he served with. Through her blog, Bahin sent
Cunningham photos of Frank L. Smith’s round metal dog tag. The tag shows only
the name and, on the reverse, a six-digit service number.
Cunningham did some checking and
found that the service number did not match her grandfather’s. But, rather than
let the matter drop, she seized on the chance to solve a mystery.
She started to do some digging. She
checked the database “U.S., Headstone Applications for Military Veterans,
1925-1963,” which she noted, for the sake of other genealogists, is available
on ancestry.com or can be accessed for free at any local library.
This database, she explained,
contains the cards filled out by relatives who wanted a headstone or marker for
the grave of a family member who had been in the military. “Luckily, all the
cards for these years,” she said, “have been scanned and are searchable.”
A search for “Frank Smith” turned up
2,100 possibilities, she said. So she narrowed the search, to “Frank L. Smith,”
and came up with just “30 or 40.”
She started to look at them, and the
third one she opened was Frank L. Smith of Voorheesville. The service number
matched.
“We talk about serendipity in
genealogy all the time,” she said by phone. “You go to a cemetery and are faced
with thousands of gravestones, and you just start walking in one direction and
pretty soon there’s the stone you were looking for.”
What are the chances, she asked, of
the “third one you open being the right one?”
She then checked the 1940 census
database, and this “gave me him and his wife, Elizabeth, so I knew I had the
right one.”
At that point, she searched online
for “Frank L. Smith” and “Voorheesville,” and “a wonderful scanned, transcribed
diary came up, and then, all of a sudden, within minutes, we had connected all
this stuff.”
Cunningham then contacted The
Enterprise and also the archivist at the Voorheesville Public Library, James
Corsaro, who had transcribed the diary and posted it online. “I want everybody
to know how great it is,” she said, “that the library has this stuff and is
making these connections for people who are doing research.”
What was really amazing, she said,
was that the diary actually mentions Smith meeting his unit as it returned from
Chateau Thierry. Bahin bought the tag at a local flea market in that area.
— Photo from Dottie Wright
Portrait of the soldier as a young
man: Frank L. Smith in uniform.
The American Expeditionary Forces
had arrived in France in the summer of 1918 to help the French fight the
Germans and were in training before their first battle, on July 18, 1918, at
Chateau Thierry.
Smith and his unit — the U.S. Army's
77th Field Artillery, Battery C — landed at Brest on the west coast of France
on June 11, 1918. They traveled eastward and northward, toward the area of
Chateau Thierry — where Bahin lives — and St. Mehiel, further east. Somewhere
along the way, Smith may have lost his tag, since the diary notes that Smith
went to a rest camp at a place he calls “Mazy,” where he says he “met the unit
coming out of Chateau Thierry front.” They then went together to a rest camp,
“but we did not get any rest. We had to drill eight hours a day; some rest
camp.”
Importantly, Smith notes, in the
next line of the diary (which is transcribed with his original misspellings),
“The fellows got paid while we were there; I did not get any pay because my
servis record had not come yet.”
If he had lost his dog tag between
his arrival in France and his passage through the area where Bahin now lives,
this could explain why he was waiting for his service record and was not paid.
Perhaps, without his tag, he had no way to prove who he was.
The diary recounts that, on Sept.
11, the men reached St. Mehiel, a town a little further east, where they fought
a fierce battle. “We went to sleep for about an hour that night,” Smith writes.
“At twelve thirty we started firing; that was some barrage. We fired until
about six the next morning and by that time there wasent any Germans left
within ten miles of us.”
Fond
of her father
Smith’s daughter, Dottie Wright, who
is 73, was reached by phone in New Bern, North Carolina and said, “I think it’s
amazing. You hear on the news about dog tags being found, but I never thought
it would be my family.”
Her father died when she was just
12. Wright says that she was very close to him as a child. “He took me
everyplace. He was a good man,” she said.
Her father and mother — who had
owned and operated Smith’s Tavern in the village — had been “very much in love,”
Wright said.
During the war, Elizabeth Smith, who
was known as “Lil,” corresponded with local soldiers who were fighting in World
War II. She sent them food, cigarettes, gum, and other supplies, and regularly
sent letters and kept them up-to-date on hometown news with her “Lil’s
Newsheet.” She later donated all of this correspondence to the Voorheesville
library.
Her mother “fell apart after he
passed away,” Wright says. Just two years later, she sold the tavern to one of
Wright’s two older brothers, Frank L. Smith Jr. “And I sort of went along with
the package,” she recalled. She went to live with her brother at that point,
until she married.
Her brother put on an addition to
the restaurant and started making pizza there, she said. “He made it famous.”
Her mother was never much of a
nurturer, Wright said. She kept busy with the store. It was her father, she
said, who “took care of me most of the time when I was little.”
— From Nancy Cunningham
This application was filled out by Frank L. Smith's wife, Elizabeth, for a
military headstone for his grave.
The diary notes that Smith was in
poor health by the time World War II broke out, and over the age of 40, and so
did not fight in that conflict. Wright, who was born in 1944, also recalls her
father as being sickly.
Wright’s daughter, Rhonda Flansburg,
co-owner of Re-Nue Spa in Altamont, said, “I would have loved to have met him.
I heard he was a really great guy.” Frank L. Smith died in 1956, before she was
born.
When The Enterprise mentioned the online
diary to Wright and Flansburg, neither of them had heard of it. They did not
know that their father and grandfather kept a diary of his wartime experiences.
In fact, Wright never knew that her
father had fought overseas. Neither of her parents had ever mentioned it.
“My mother moved on [moving to
Florida] when I was 14,” Wright said. “I don’t have much connection to the
past.
“I have a watch that was my
father’s,” she said. “That’s the only thing I have of his.”
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