WWI soldiers in Cape County

A Cape Girardeau County archivist is untangling incomplete, handwritten records to build the most accurate list yet of local World War I soldiers.

As part of my ongoing quest to update the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center’s website, which launched several years before I came on board in 2020, I recently noticed the list of World War I personnel noted as being from the county. This list was compiled by someone in about 2002 from a few sources, including a monument each in Capaha Park and on the 1908 Courthouse lawn, and from a list of about 350 “biographies” available at the Archive.

These biographies are a one-page form, listing the veteran’s name, service record and some brief biographical information, such as parents’ names, schools attended and in some cases, ancestors who were also service members. These appear to be part of a self-reported project conducted both by Missouri counties and the Missouri Adjutant General’s office. Notes on a couple of these forms lead me to believe there was a medal awarded as a result.

I organized and documented the Archive’s collection of biographies and mentioned this to historian Denise Lincoln. She provided me with two valuable resources: a list of Black soldiers from WWI (most of whom were not on my list at all) and a link to the Missouri Secretary of State’s Digital Heritage website collection of Cape Girardeau County WWI service records.

I ran into complications. In 1920, when these records were created, typewriters were not in widespread use, so most of the records are handwritten by the soldiers or their next of kin, meaning transcription errors are to be expected; and no one source was complete — I don’t know of a single master list of WWI service personnel. If one exists, please let me know.

After I added all of the names I could verify, eliminated obvious duplicates (one that sent me to the census records to attempt to verify spelling was Guy E. Richter, whose “u” looked an awful lot like an “re,” so he might be listed as Guy Richter or Grey Richter, but the 1910 census referred to him as Guy), and cleaned up what I could, I had a list of about 1,300 names, with about 900 names unverified. This seemed like a lot to me, so I checked the county’s total population numbers as of 1920: just shy of 30,000 residents, or about 4% of the population. Possibly the existing list of 1,300 names includes everyone who was drafted, not necessarily everyone who served.

The Recorder of Deeds has a book, Index to Military Service Records: 1918-1991, digitized on its website (scroll down and click the link to ArcaSearch, click to enter as a free user, then find the Index to Military Service Records on the menu), which I am slowly working my way through, checking names from the list for the website against it, but since the book starts in 1919, I am sure there will be omissions.

I’ll be checking newspapers from the time period, too, which will also be a time-intensive process.

Read the entire article on the Southeast Missourian website.
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