April 10, 2026
I’ve always found it difficult to research more recent ancestors. The records that genealogists rely on are often sealed for this era. Birth and death records later than the 1950s are sometimes difficult to access because many states consider them private. Copyright issues frequently mean that helpful articles aren’t available digitally.
Recently, however, I’ve been taking another look at some mid-twentieth century ancestors. Now that most of the World War II generation is gone, I realize that I should have asked more questions. At the time, it seemed that my husband and I had plumbed the depths of our parents’ memories.
Turns out no matter how many questions you ask, new ones will come up after the relatives are gone. I’ve never heard a genealogist wish that he hadn’t spent so much time talking about the past with his parents and grandparents.
My husband’s father was a flight surgeon in World War II. Both he and my mother-in-law told us stories about the war years. We thought we knew everything there was to know. Now that they’re both gone, we realize that we don’t know as much as we thought.
We know that my father-in-law knew he’d be called up soon after Pearl Harbor. The military needed doctors, and my father-in-law was young and healthy. He wanted to fly, but he knew the army probably wouldn’t let him. They needed doctors more than pilots, who could be trained much more quickly than surgeons.
The next best thing was to become a flight surgeon. By enlisting soon after Pearl Harbor, my father-in-law got some choice in his service. That meant when he entered the army in 1942, he became a flight surgeon who served in North Africa and Italy. For years that’s all we’ve known about my father-in-law’s war service.
We’ve accessed some military records, but like many World War II soldiers, most of my father-in-law’s records were destroyed in 1973 in a fire at a National Archives storage center. Looking into regimental histories has helped us fill in some of the blanks about my father-in-law’s time in the military.
Filling in the blanks of my mother-in-law’s experiences at home in New Jersey during the war hasn’t been even more difficult.
When her husband went off to war, we knew that my mother-in-law moved home to her parents’ house for the duration. Pregnant when her husband left for overseas, my mother-in-law’s first child was born while he was gone. We’ve always wondered about her experiences, but she never talked much about them.
Until recently, we thought we’d never know any more about my in-laws’ separate lives during World War II. All of that changed when I casually did a search on Newspapers.com. New Jersey papers have always been sparse online. This was especially true for South Jersey where my in-laws lived. I wasn’t expecting much when I started my search.
However, I was surprised to find a long run of the Camden Courier-Post and the Gloucester County Times. The local columns in those newspapers from the war years contained numerous bits about my in-laws.
I learned the date my mother-in-law received news that her husband had arrived safely in North Africa. I found photos of my father-in-law when he received military promotions, and I read about the baby shower my mother-in-law’s friends gave her while her husband was overseas. We now know a lot of details about my in-laws’ war years that we didn’t know before.
If I’d stopped researching because I thought there were few online resources for recent ancestors, I would never have found any of the World War II era articles about my in-laws. Never stop researching. New information is being posted all the time. You may be surprised what you’ll find.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society