Their past is the frozen December that befell Europe in 1944, when all four were killed.
The time portal through which they’ve arrived is the Fisher Family Library in the Heritage Center of Clark County, a modest-sized room that houses the offices of the Clark County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society.
First on the scene last spring was Pfc. Harold “Bud” Faulder, mentioned in a letter sent to the chapter by Phillipe Lambiet, a volunteer who cares for Faulder’s grave in the American Military Cemetery outside of Henri-Chapelle, Belgium.
Knowing only that he was born “11 December 1916” and died Dec. 3, 1944, in Belgium fighting, in Lambiet’s words, “for our own freedom,” Lambiet wrote hoping to find “some more informations (sic) about him” and to make contact with a family member.
Flossie Hulsizer, editor of the chapter newsletter, “Clark County Kin,” printed Lambiet’s letter in the next edition and, with it, part of the lengthy newspaper article The Sun published Jan. 13, 1945, about Faulder.
“Holder of the Silver Star Medal for ‘exceptional bravery in action,’ (he) was called by his commander ‘the man who single-handedly held off a determined German threat, enabling his company to capture Hill 88 and the fortress of Brest, France, in a daring one-man counter-attack.”
Located on the western coast of France, Brest was a strategic port through which Allied war supplies were routed, though only after a long, difficult siege.
Twenty-seven when he died, he was an Enon High School graduate who worked at Springfield’s Steel Products Engineering Co., and was survived by his mother, Harriet Faulder, of 537 Linden Ave., and three sisters.
The next newsletter, published last summer, printed a response to Lambiet written in July by Marlene Rust Haucke, the youngest child of Faulder’s sister, Mary Kay.
Haucke, who saw her uncle off to war at one of Springfield’s train stations and remembers a gift from him of a stuffed animal, wrote that “in addition to the Silver Star, he was awarded the Purple Heart (and) his name is on the Veterans Memorial in downtown Springfield.”
Haucke’s older sister, Anne, described their uncle as “a very adventurous man” who “hitched auto rides as his means of getting places,” a characteristic the family connected with his battlefield bravery.
That same newsletter brought forth a second soldier from the past, the uncle Clark County chapter member Kent Immerfall never knew.
First Lt. Floyd A. Stott, “is also resting in the same cemetery … along with 11 of his platoon,” killed Dec. 27, 1944, by friendly fire near the Battle of the Manhay Crossroads in Belgium, one of the fights in the Battle of the Bulge.
With other members of the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team who “jumped into Southern France 15 August 1944,” Immerfall said the uncle he never knew perished when “a wayward shell” fell on to their advance position.
“As an aside,” Immerfall added, “Henri-Chapelle is a beautiful location,” and the Belgian man who keeps the cross clean and places occasional flowers on Stott’s grave “is one of many who do the same for our servicemen who perished overseas.”
The other two Clark County soldiers to appear in the Fisher Library emerged more slowly after an email arrived from Terry Hirsch, a native Ohioan now living in Indianapolis.
Preparing for a second year of a commemorative project called “The Faces of Margraten,” the village of that name in The Netherlands was trying to find pictures of Pfc. Earl Bartels and S/Sgt. Harry Byerman to display next to their headstones in the military cemetery there.
Added Hirsch, “both of these men — as is every man buried there — have been adopted by a Dutch local who visits them and brings them flowers.”
Having received Hirsch’s email April 5 and facing an April 18 deadline to submit the photos, Hulsizer didn’t have time to get the word out through the newsletter.
“The first thing I did was go to the (Springfield) phone book. I found a list of Byermans. I called the first one on the list,” and reached the wife of Gil Byerman, who told Hulsizer that he was her husband’s cousin.
By April 12, an email arrived from Judy Lee Byerman Boysel, who was 3 when her father went down with a B-24 Liberator over Europe on Dec. 13, 1944.
Clippings from Springfield New-Sun newspapers of Feb. 2, 1943, and Jan. 14, 1944, reveal that Byerman, the tail gunner in the Eighth Air Force, spent his final days stateside with wife, Harriett, and daughter, Judy.
They joined him in Salt Lake City just before his graduation from Armament School on Jan. 17, 1943, and stayed with him there until he left for England, where he arrived that June for service with the Eighth Air Force.
Called “Bud” by his family, as Faulder had been, Byerman, was a son of Harry E. Byerman of 1516 N. Belmont Ave., and had attended Springfield High School and worked at Robbins and Myers before entering the service.
Born while his father was overseas, his son, Jack, was just 9-months-old on Jan. 11, 1944, when his father’s status was changed from missing in action to killed in action, leaving his widow to raise their children.
Hulsizer, who said that getting the photos from Jack, who lives in Texas, was fairly easy. But coaxing Pfc. Bartels from the past proved to be more difficult.
It was aided, however, by the timing of a chapter meeting the Saturday after the Byerman success.
After a presentation by Hulsizer, member Al Wansing went to the 1930 and 1940 census records and found that Bartels, who was born in Greene County but lived in South Charleston, had a younger sister named Barbara.
That sent Hulsizer to Familysearch.org, where she found Barbara Bartels had married Wayne Johnson Wead, and that their daughter, Nancy Kay Wead, had married Leroy McKinney in Greene County.
“This one was hard because it was daughter-daughter-daughter,” which required tracing other surnames down the family tree, Hulsizer said.
It was also made more stressful by time constraints.
On April 15 — just three days before the picture deadline — “I was stopped because they weren’t in the (Xenia) phone book,” Hulsizer said.
She rebooted her search by going to the free online white pages, found a number for Leroy McKinney, dialed it, and was leaving a voice message when Nancy McKinney “heard me mentioning her mother and uncle (and) picked up the phone.”
That same day, McKinney scanned two photos from a scrapbook kept by her uncle’s widow, Martha Jane Cornwell Bartels, and emailed them to Hirsh to be forwarded to Margraten.
A clipping from the Jan. 31, 1945, edition of Springfield’s morning newspaper, The Sun, said Bartels, a basketball star at St. Bridget High School in Xenia, had worked at Patterson Field before entering the service and had been in Europe since August, serving with a combat engineers division since the previous August.
The scrapbook included a typewritten account from Martha Bartels.
“Letters came from the chaplain who buried Earl, and from his friends — some of whom were with him when he was killed …. It was the first night that his outfit was in the ‘Battle of the Bulge.’”
Her note also describes the aftermath of the news.
“I still find it hard to believe it happened to us,” said the woman who the previous June had lost her bother, Capt. Frank Lee Cornwell, to combat in France.
“There is no describing that time. My money from the government stopped immediately,” Martha Bartels said. “I was to get a pension, but it took six months for it to start. I had no savings, of course because I spent whatever I got to be with Earl when I could.”
Hulsizer said it felt good to help the researchers restore the memories of four soldiers lost in December of 1944, and felt good to know a new generation of people in Belgium and The Netherlands who have amassed the pictures and tended the graves.
As for the note typed into Martha Bartel’s scrapbook?
That may be yet another thing to ponder Monday as flags flap in the heavy silence.
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