{"id":7201,"date":"2019-04-27T15:22:29","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T19:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=7201"},"modified":"2019-04-27T15:22:29","modified_gmt":"2019-04-27T19:22:29","slug":"fred-e-pluff-world-war-veteran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/fred-e-pluff-world-war-veteran\/","title":{"rendered":"Fred E. Pluff, World War Veteran"},"content":{"rendered":"

The veteran who was given the service medal I wrote about last \"\"<\/a>was Fred E. Pluff.\u00a0 I have been working on developing a family tree for him in an effort to discover whether there are living descendants.\u00a0 It turns out that he is more difficult to track than I might have thought he would be.<\/p>\n

Although I now have a timeline for his life, many of the the events are only indirectly supported by evidence so far.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t even know his first name when I started out because the medal we had only showed initials: F.E.\u00a0 And although I should have thought of it, I didn\u2019t immediately look to the town\u2019s memorial to veterans to see if he was listed (he is, with his name not just initials).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This must be our guy!\u00a0 This also told me he was married.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s life.\u00a0 The timeline looks like this:<\/p>\n

1900 – Fred E. born, Lawrence (birth registration shows 7\/13\/1900 with parents Joseph Pluff and Bella Woods).\u00a0 Father born in Montpelier, VT and mother in Canada.<\/p>\n

1901 – Fred Edward born, Andover (birth registration shows 7\/13\/1901 with parents Joseph Pluff and Della Wood).\u00a0 Father born in Montpelier, VT and mother in Canada.\u00a0 This has to be the same child and parents, so why did they register his birth twice and with a year’s difference?<\/p>\n

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

1918 – married Alice Maria Felicie Petit in France (marriage registration shows marriage on 12\/17\/1918).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His parents were listed as Joseph Pluff and Delia Dubois.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

1919 – Fred\u2019s 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.\u00a0 He had been wounded and was returning to seek additional medical care.<\/p>\n

1919 – transported back to US with wife (transport lists show they left France 3\/27\/1919 and arrived in Massachusetts 4\/4\/1919).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fred\u2019s wife was put in the care of his mother and taken by her to the family home in North Reading.<\/p>\n

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

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

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).<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 Fred\u2019s application included a certification from the Lawrence City Clerk\u2019s office about his date of birth (7\/13\/1900) and his parents\u2019 names: Joseph Pluff and Bella Woods.\u00a0 The description of the applicant includes that he had a bayonet wound in his right arm.<\/p>\n

So far, so good.\u00a0 I\u2019m fairly certain that this timeline shows the same Fred Pluff from birth to getting home from fighting in the World War in France.\u00a0 Then I hit the roadblocks we all hit at some point.\u00a0 There did not seem to be any U.S. records of the couple or their daughter after 1920-21.\u00a0 I did not see any listing of them returning to the U.S. nor of future events in their daughter\u2019s life nor of their deaths.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The lists I was able to find showed trips from France to New York, but not from New York to France.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It looks like I’m in for more practice with my high-school French, such as it is.\u00a0 Thankfully the internet now includes the possibility to translate at least words and phrases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The veteran who was given the service medal I wrote about last was Fred E. Pluff.\u00a0 I have been working on developing a family tree for him in an effort to discover whether there are living descendants.\u00a0 It turns out …<\/p>\n

Fred E. Pluff, World War Veteran<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[411,410,408],"class_list":["post-7201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-medal","tag-pluff","tag-world-war-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7201"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7207,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7201\/revisions\/7207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}