Fred E. Pluff, World War Veteran

The veteran who was given the service medal I wrote about last was Fred E. Pluff.  I have been working on developing a family tree for him in an effort to discover whether there are living descendants.  It turns out that he is more difficult to track than I might have thought he would be.

Although I now have a timeline for his life, many of the the events are only indirectly supported by evidence so far.  I didn’t even know his first name when I started out because the medal we had only showed initials: F.E.  And although I should have thought of it, I didn’t immediately look to the town’s memorial to veterans to see if he was listed (he is, with his name not just initials).  I started looking on ancestry.com and the first thing I found was a passenger list of soldiers in France bound for the U.S. which listed Fred E. Pluff with a wife in North Reading, Massachusetts.  This must be our guy!  This also told me he was married.

I kept looking and over the span of the next couple of months I found a number of pieces of evidence that seemed to all (mostly) fit together to outiline this particular Fred’s life.  The timeline looks like this:

1900 – Fred E. born, Lawrence (birth registration shows 7/13/1900 with parents Joseph Pluff and Bella Woods).  Father born in Montpelier, VT and mother in Canada.

1901 – Fred Edward born, Andover (birth registration shows 7/13/1901 with parents Joseph Pluff and Della Wood).  Father born in Montpelier, VT and mother in Canada.  This has to be the same child and parents, so why did they register his birth twice and with a year’s difference?

1917 – enlisted in National Guard in Lawrence and shipped out to France (military transport list gives Mrs. Joseph Pluff, mother, residing in Haverhill).

1918 – married Alice Maria Felicie Petit in France (marriage registration shows marriage on 12/17/1918).  Interestingly Fred Edouard was reported to have been born in Lawrence on 7/13/1895, thus adding 5 years to his age and making him an adult.  His parents were listed as Joseph Pluff and Delia Dubois.  This record is from an archives in France, and written in French, so I don’t know yet exactly what the whole record includes although I can read the young couple’s names and translate his birth date.

1919 – Fred’s new wife applied for a U.S. passport (image shows 2/22/1919 was application date) so that she could accompany him on the ship home.  He had been wounded and was returning to seek additional medical care.

1919 – transported back to US with wife (transport lists show they left France 3/27/1919 and arrived in Massachusetts 4/4/1919).  Newspaper articles show that he and other veterans went to Ft. Devens and the French wives on-board were taken care of by the Red Cross which housed them and assured that they were reunited with their husbands as quickly as could be done.  Fred’s wife was put in the care of his mother and taken by her to the family home in North Reading.

1920 – living in Reading (the federal census taken 1/12/1920 showed the young couple and her mother).

1920 – daughter Mary Charlotte was born (birth registration shows she was born in Reading on 3/13/1920).

1921 – wife Alice Marie Pluff applied for a passport to go to France with their young daughter due to ill-health (her passport application dated 4/1/1921 said she planned to sail from New York on 4/14/1921).

1921 – several months later Fred applied for passport to go to France, reporting his wife sick (his passport application dated 9/7/1921 said he planned to sail from New York on 9/10/1921).  Fred’s application included a certification from the Lawrence City Clerk’s office about his date of birth (7/13/1900) and his parents’ names: Joseph Pluff and Bella Woods.  The description of the applicant includes that he had a bayonet wound in his right arm.

So far, so good.  I’m fairly certain that this timeline shows the same Fred Pluff from birth to getting home from fighting in the World War in France.  Then I hit the roadblocks we all hit at some point.  There did not seem to be any U.S. records of the couple or their daughter after 1920-21.  I did not see any listing of them returning to the U.S. nor of future events in their daughter’s life nor of their deaths.  And although I had the names of the ships they had listed on the 1921 passport applications, there were no passenger lists or arrivals in France to be found.  The lists I was able to find showed trips from France to New York, but not from New York to France.

So I think the next step is to dig down in the French records I can find (I did find their marriage record after all!) and see if I can discover more of the story.  It looks like I’m in for more practice with my high-school French, such as it is.  Thankfully the internet now includes the possibility to translate at least words and phrases.