How I found the grave of Pvt. Elmer Kenneth Gorham, WWI medic

As I walked through New Calvary Cemetery outside Boston, I couldnt help but think about the young men who toiled in the trenches dug throughout Europes fields and forests a century ago. The whistle would sound, they would clamber over the top and make a mad dash across no mans land, getting caught up on barbed wire, slipping in the mud, as they were torn to pieces by artillery and machine-gun-fire or crippled by poison gas, with hand-to-hand combat being their reward if they made it across the field of battle.

After following a path to discover my family history in World War I, I ended up at the cemetery, pondering the indifference exhibited worldwide in regard to the war and the men who shed their blood in it. I was also searching for the unmarked grave of my great-grandfather, Pvt. Elmer Kenneth Gorham, a medic with the 101st Ambulance Company, 26th Yankee Division, Massachusetts Army National Guard.

Finding his final resting place amid the rows of headstones, obelisks and lawn level markers proved to be as difficult as locating his records in the U.S. government archives. The majority of Army personnel records from 1912 through 1959 were destroyed in a fire in 1973, according to researchers from the National Personnel Records Center, which holds one of the largest collections of federal records in the country, including military personnel records. Approximately 16 million to 18 million Army and Air Force files were lost.

As if that wasnt bad enough, the markers of these brave Americans have been swallowed by the earth in cemeteries across the nation. Roadside graves have been disturbed and desecrated across Europe by souvenir hunters and remains picked clean of identifying markers like dog tags, buttons and helmets. Sadly, many of those items wind up in makeshift home museums or auctioned on eBay.

It was a long hard road to find Pvt. Gorham.

According my family, Elmer Sr. had served in the Army during World War I, then in the Marine Corps. He fathered 10 children in the Boston suburbs, where he worked as a railroad electrician.

My grandfather, also named Elmer, was the oldest. He was 15 when his father died in 1939 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 41.

Elmer Jr., now in his 90s, had served in the Marine Corps during World War II and later the Korean conflict. He had few memories of his father, who worked nights and slept during the day.

I wanted to know more about the man who raised the man who had played a large role in raising me. So I visited the NPRC website in November 2013 and filled out and mailed in the form to make my request.

By February 2014, I had his Marine Corps file from after World War I and a note telling me that his Army records had burned.

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How I found the grave of Pvt. Elmer Kenneth Gorham, WWI medic