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Ancestry Daily News
5/23/2002 - Archive
Help Bring Our Korean War Soldiers Home
Editor's Note: This article originally ran in May of 2001, and with the upcoming
Memorial Day holiday looming, it is appropriate that we re-run it.
I spoke with Megan at the NGS Conference in Milwaukee and she tells me that
the California legislation that threatens to severely restrict access to vital
records indexes in California will make her work on this project much more difficult.
For more information on California Senate Bill 1614, and contact information
for California legislators, see the article at:
here
Juliana Smith
Editor, Ancestry Daily News
Baltimore Payne was born in 1912 in Illinois to parents who had ventured slightly
north from Missouri. He was one of ten children and grew up to marry, have children,
and join the Army. In 1950, he was sent to Korea where he paid the ultimate
price, dying just as most Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving. Unfortunately,
the circumstances of his death were such that his remains were never found,
so his family was denied the chance to pay their respects, bury him, and properly
grieve.
The U.S. Army's Repatriation and Family Affairs Division—which recently traced
his family to people with five surnames residing in four states—is working to
change that. The objective of this organization is to locate and re-establish
ties with the family members of the 6,318 soldiers who were never accounted
for in the Korean War. To put this into perspective, this is about three times
as many soldiers as those still unaccounted for from Vietnam. The ticking clock—fifty
years and counting—makes it both urgent and somewhat difficult to find these
soldiers' families.
By locating family members, the Army hopes not only to help with the inevitable,
unanswered questions, but also to build a database of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)
samples. With relations with North Korea slowly improving (this, in spite of
the fact that an official cessation of hostilities was never declared!) and
search and recovery efforts escalating, the Army has more hope of bringing soldiers
home now than they did in the first four decades following the war. During the
1990s, several hundred sets of remains were repatriated, but now the challenge
is to identify them so they can be accorded a formal military funeral.
At this point, approximately 30 percent of the soldiers' families have been
found and the mtDNA database contains samples for slightly more than 20 percent
of the soldiers. As the database grows, so do the chances of matches confirming
the identification of Baltimore Payne or any individual missing soldier.
The Army would like your help in finding the other 4,000+ families. Please don't
think you can't help just because you weren't even born then. Almost everyone
in the U.S. knows of someone who served in Korea, whether he returned or not.
Maybe it was your grandfather or your brother. Maybe it was that acquaintance
from high school. Maybe it was that fellow who worked at the mill with your
father. Or maybe it was you.
If you have any connection—no matter how remote—to someone who served in Korea,
please visit http://www.koreanwar.org.
This site lists all the men who are still unaccounted for. You can search for
a soldier's name and then leave a remembrance with whatever details you might
have. No detail is too insignificant, but ones pertaining to the soldiers' families
are especially helpful. Names of siblings (generally not contained in the soldiers'
files) can often bring a case to resolution. A remarriage of the soldier's mother
or the fact that his brood moved from New Jersey to Arizona can be enormously
useful. Just think for yourself what information you would need to trace a line
in your own extended clan forward from 1950. The same information is needed
by the Army. Remember, too, that others who served frequently knew quite a lot
about the Stateside lives of their fellow soldiers. Please consider quizzing
any Korean War veterans you might know about the men they served with. Should
you note a "DNA" tag next to the soldier's name, this means his family is being
actively sought. If you see this, you might want to consider calling the Army
directly at 800-892-2490 in addition to leaving a remembrance.
Baltimore gave his life for his country. That it happened fifty years ago makes
it no smaller a sacrifice or any less important. The Korean War was fought from
1950 to 1953, so we are in the midst of an extended 50th anniversary. What more
fitting tribute than to see that as many of these soldiers as possible are properly
honored and interred?
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