For most of my life, I’ve wondered who my maternal grandfather was and whether I would ever know anything about him. My mother’s mother, Emma, lived in remote Dillon, Montana, and I knew her husband was not my real grandfather. I overheard at least that much while I was growing up in Chicago during the 1930s, amid the Great Depression.

I only met my grandmother Emma once. She stopped at our home in Chicago for a few minutes in 1946, on her way to Highland Park to visit her sister Nellie and brother George. I had no chance to ask her about my grandfather. She died in Dillon, Montana in 1969 at the age of eighty-four without telling her children or grandchildren the truth about my grandfather.

My father, Fred, for some reason, went along with the deception. I once asked him about mother’s father, and he told me that he had been a soldier and had died aboard a troop ship that sank during World War I. I suspected it wasn’t the truth, especially when he couldn’t tell me the name of mother’s father, the name of the ship, or when and where it was sunk.

My sister Mary was close to our mother, but she could never get her to talk about our grandfather either. She always said that she didn’t know who her father was. Mother was placed in a nursing home in Chicago during the 1980s after a series of small strokes incapacitated her. She slowly worsened in the nursing home, and the chances of her ever telling us what she knew faded as well.

Mary saw her once a week or more, and when I could travel from my home in Utah, I would meet Mary at the nursing home and visit as best we could with our mother.

During these trips, I would also drive up to Libertyville, Illinois to visit mother’s Aunt Nellie, who was also in a nursing home. I last visited Nellie in 1987 when she was ninety-seven years old. Despite her age, her mind and memory were very clear, and she could talk in detail about people and events from many years in the past. So I tried one more time.

I asked her, "Aunt Nellie, who was my grandfather?"

Without hesitation, she said, "Oh, he was just some French-Canadian passing through Highland Park." I sensed it was another wrong answer, but I said nothing.

Nellie died the following year; mother died in 1991 at the age of ninety. It appeared that my sister and I would never know the identity of and the truth about our grandfather.

Mary acquired mother’s meager possessions following her death, and among them was a metal box filled with papers. Mary didn’t look at them closely for a couple of years, but when she did she discovered that, by mistake or intent, our grandfather’s name was among the papers in the box. I suspect that mother intended for us to find out the truth about our grandfather after her death.

The box contained three early-1900 letters addressed to our grandmother, Emma Nichols in Highland Park, Illinois. The first letter, dated 16 August 1901, was from Ora Helm, a soldier in Company E, 5th Infantry, Bacnotan, Luzon, Philippine Islands. He was apparently one of 126,000 U.S. soldiers sent there to fight in the Philippine-American War between 1899 and 1902. (Bacnotan is about 100 miles northwest of Manila.)

In the letter, Ora told Emma he was always thinking about her, hoped she was thinking about him, and wished he was back at Fort Sheridan and could see her again. (Fort Sheridan, located several miles north of Highland Park, was an Army basic training site for many years.)

Ora said he would be back in Highland Park when his enlistment was up in another year, and at the bottom of the letter, he wrote: "My love and regards to you from Ora to Emma." Obviously, he didn’t know then that my mother had been born six weeks earlier on 2 July 1901. There was no airmail or e-mail back then, and letters crossed the ocean on slow ships.

The second letter, dated 7 November 1901, was from another soldier, Charles Danenman, who said he was Ora Helm’s best friend and had met Emma when she was with Ora in Highland Park. He said he had sad news for her. Ora had volunteered to go with Sergeant Sullivan and five other soldiers to search for some new trails on the mountain. The trail they were following gave out at a river, and instead of turning back, the sergeant decided they should swim downstream. Weighed down by their clothing and rifles, Ora and another soldier drowned near San Gabriel, Union, Luzon. After two days of trying to recover the bodies from the river, the soldiers left the task to the local people and returned to camp.

Charles Danenman said that the soldiers would try to take up a collection for the baby girl, and that Ora Helm had planned to send ten dollars a month for her support. Ora had told his friend about the girl every time he received a letter from Emma. The letters established that Ora Helm was the father of my mother, Florence Nichols.

The third and final letter, also from Danenman, dated 5 May 1902, stated that the company had been moved a lot and had not been paid, but they still planned to send money for Ora’s daughter. He said that Ora’s body had been recovered and was buried with full military honors in the cemetery in Manila. Danenman also said that his own home was not far from Highland Park, and that he would visit Emma and her daughter when he was discharged from the Army.

The reference to correspondence between Emma and Ora seemed to indicate that the two would probably have been married after he returned to Highland Park. Of course, the news of his death changed everything. Some time after that, Emma moved to Dillon, Montana to live with her sister and brother-in-law. The baby Florence was left in Highland Park.

I suppose the events were viewed as a scandal in Highland Park, Illinois in 1901, but I wasn’t sure that was reason enough to keep it secret for ninety years. I wanted to learn more about my grandfather.

From the National Archives I obtained NATF Form 80, Order for Copies of Veterans Records. I hoped that his name, date and place of death, and the name of his Army unit would be enough to locate the service records of Ora Helm, and it was. Not long after I sent in the form, I received photocopies of his records.

I learned that my grandfather, Ora Helm, was born 28 September 1875 in Huntington, Indiana. He enlisted in the U.S. Army on 24 July 1900 in Chicago, Illinois, and was assigned to Fort Sheridan for training. His next of kin was Benjamin Helm, but the relationship was not given. He was five feet, five inches tall (about five inches taller than Emma), had brown eyes and dark brown hair, and had a tattoo of hands clasped in prayer on his right forearm. His commanding officer wrote after Ora Helm’s death that his service was "honest and faithful."

There was a notation on the service records jacket: "SOS to Daughter, Mrs. Florence Hamilton, Chicago, IL." Included was a copy of a letter to my mother from the National Archives, dated 15 December 1960, with all the details of her father’s birth date and place, his enlistment date and place, and when, where, and how he died. It certainly was not scandalous information, but mother kept the information from us.

Another notation on the records jacket said, "Headstone case, Jan. 31, 1936—WKT." This seemed to indicate that some government agency provided a headstone for his grave at that time. I wondered whether the headstone was placed on his grave in Manila or somewhere in the United States.

I called an Army Reserve phone number in Salt Lake City and asked if there was an Army office in Washington that could tell me where the headstone was sent. I called the number I was given, but kept getting referred to other numbers in the Pentagon. I finally realized all I was doing was running up my phone bill with no results.

Being a journalist, I wrote to the publisher of the largest newspaper in Manila, asking that he or his staff tell me who or where to write to find out if my grandfather’s grave was still in Manila. I never received a reply.

Next, I contacted my cousin George F. Jones, a career employee in the U.S. State Department Foreign Service, and asked if he knew who to contact. He sent an e-mail to a colleague in the Philippines, who said I should write to the commander of the United States Veterans of Foreign Wars Post there, and gave me his name and address.

I wrote to Kenneth Schaefer, a U.S. commander in the Philippines, and told him what I wanted to know. He replied that the remains at Fort McKinley in Manila were moved to the military cemetery at Clark Air Base in 1950. When the U.S. later turned over the base to the Philippine government, the VFW post took over the cemetery and has since computerized the records of the more than 8,000 U.S. servicemen buried there. Ora Helm’s name was not in the records.

I wondered if my grandmother in Dillon, Montana had moved the remains of Ora Helm to the cemetery there, and perhaps his grave headstone was placed there in 1936. I wrote to the director of the Dillon cemetery, who replied that there is no one named Ora Helm buried there.

The next possibility was Huntington, Indiana, where Ora Helm was born. I first checked the telephone listings for the area and found no Helm phone numbers. Then I turned to "Where to Write for Vital Records," from the Consumer Education Research Center, in South Orange, New Jersey. It advised contacting the health officer in the city or county where a person was born to obtain birth records.

I thought that if I could obtain a copy of Ora Helm’s birth record, I could trace his parents, learn where they were buried, and maybe find Ora buried there as well. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do that, because it would not have been easy.

I called the Huntington Health Department and was told to contact Mrs. Joan Keefer, a librarian at the Huntington City-Township Library, who maintains the city and county vital records. I wrote to her in July of 1997, asking for a copy of Ora Helm’s birth certificate, and was pleasantly surprised two months later when I received a thick letter with a wealth of Helm family information. I felt very fortunate and thankful. Not long before, I had no idea who my grandfather was, and now I knew his name and family history going back to the seventeenth century.

The history begins with Thomas Helm, born in 1642 in Goosnargh, Lancashire, England. The Helm family emigrated to the United States around 1675. Members of the family were pioneers in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and Meredith, a grandson of Thomas Helm, served as one of the first justices in the Frederick County Court in 1743 and became sheriff in 1753.

Members of the Helm family served in the American Army during the Revolution, fought in the Civil War, and had a continuing record of public service and as professionals in the legal and medical fields. Books and other genealogical sources bear out the facts of a commendable Helm family history. There doesn’t appear to be anything to warrant keeping it from Ora Helm’s grandchildren for ninety years.

Along with the information were lists from the Star of Hope Cemetery and Barnes Chapel Cemetery, both in Huntington. Ora Helm is buried in Star of Hope Cemetery near his father, Benjamin Franklin Helm, who was born in 1828 in Ohio and died in 1913 in Huntington. He served in Company F, 47th Infantry, in the Civil War. Benjamin’s mother, Levina, is buried there, as well as his first wife, Margaret. He and Margaret apparently were childless.

Ora’s mother, Rebecca Pritchet, who died in 1891, is buried in Barnes Chapel Cemetery near her first husband, James Myers. Ora’s father, Benjamin Franklin Helm, died in 1913, probably unaware that he had a granddaughter. In the few months between learning he was a father and his untimely death, Ora may not have told his father about his daughter, or if he did, didn’t give him enough information to follow up on.

No doubt Benjamin Franklin Helm thought that his branch of the Helm family died with his son, Ora. But Ora is survived by seven grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren, and six great-great-grandchildren.

It is unfortunate that the only apparent reason for keeping the name of our grandfather secret for ninety years was that he and Emma were not married when their daughter, my mother Florence, was born. There is so much more in Ora Helm’s ancestry that should have outweighed an indiscretion back in 1900.

I had planned to visit Chicago in 1998 and take my sister Mary to visit our grandfather’s grave in Indiana for the first time. But Mary died of lung cancer in February of that year. I hope to make the trip by myself some time soon. When I do, I’ll visit the grave and stop by the library to thank Mrs. Joan Keefer for her immense help in my search for Grandpa Helm. a

Return to the Ancestry Magazine September/October 2001 Table of Contents.