Uncle John

One of my earliest memories is of going to my [great] Uncle John’s funeral in the 1970s. He was a tall, broadshouldered man with white hair still with a tinge of red. He was a nice, gentle man who didn’t talk much and walked everywhere. He never married, his family was his sister and brother-in-law (my grandma and grandpa) and their children and grandchildren.

Uncle John would walk miles to my grandparent’s house, eat dinner wirh us, watch a baseball or football game, His was a comfortable presence though every once in a while he’d zone out – just stare far off in the distance for what seemed like hours.

Uncle John was a World War I veteran, he was in the tenches on the Western Front. He left a piece of him somewhere in Flanders.

That was all any of us knew. Uncle John mentioned France a few times but briefly and without a single detail. My grandparents occassionally said something to the effect that he had “never been the same since France.”

His funeral was amazing for a little kid. The wake was spread over three floors of an old Victorian, it was packed, and the food was great – I’m sure the alcohol was top notch too.

I went to college and majored in histoy and English. I read Yeats and the great war poets and was fascinated by the horrors of The Great War. I thought of Uncle John oftern and wnated – needed – to know more.

But there was no one alive to fill me in.

Here’s the sum total of everything I know about Uncle John: he was Irish, he was one of 8 or 9 siblings from Roscommon, and . . . that was it. with the advent of the internet I thought I’d find my answers. Then I realized exactly how much trouble I was in – my grandmother came to the United States in 1902, alone. I had no idea when Uncle John came to the United States.

That meant that he could have served in the British (200,000 Irishmen fought with the British, Canadian (he could have immigrated there first), or U.S. (if he immigrated before 1917) armies. Major problem with the U.S. Army – 18 million records were destroyed in a fire in 1973, there was no way to find him. Major problem with the British and Canadian records – John Finn is pretty much the Irish equivilent to John Smith. There are hundreds of John Finns.

I’m still trying. I wouldn’t be if I had asked when I had the chance. And recorded it for forver.

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