Soon after the end of World War I, the State of Utah prepared certificates of gratitude for all the men who had served in the military from Utah. It’s been a while since I last saw one of these certificates so I can’t estimate the dimensions, but they were quite large – much bigger than 8-1/2″ x 11″. They were printed on paper so thick that it was more like cardstock than paper. The veteran’s name was written in calligraphy. They bore original signatures of the governor and other state officials, and a gold seal and other fol-de-rols. They were quite impressive, as such certificates go.

Determining who had “served from Utah” was based entirely on the place where the men had registered for the draft, and the certificates were sent to the cities and towns of registration, to be distributed by local officials.

In the 1990s, I used to drive down to Marysvale, Piute County, Utah, for their annual town reunions on Memorial Day weekend. There was a flag ceremony at the cemetery. There were horse races, and a “fish rodeo” in the old open-air dance pavilion that had once been a roller-skating rink owned by my great-uncle (the dance floor was marked by low walls, and they flooded the place a foot or so deep, turned in lots of trout, and let little kids up to a certain age flail around in the water trying to catch fish with their bare hands). The cafeteria of the elementary school was opened as a gathering place, with historical displays on the walls. I used to take my printer and laptop down, and printed out what I had in my files for any name anybody asked about.

One year, spread out on one of the cafeteria tables were perhaps 20 of those World War I certificates that had never been distributed, but had turned up in a closet in some city office all those decades later. If you found one that belonged to your family, you were free to take it. I found one for my great-uncle Orson Taylor – he of the open-air roller-skating rink – but not one for my grandfather Homer Taylor who had also served. Presumably my grandfather had picked up his certificate at some point, while his brother had not.

It was easy to realize why most of the remaining certificates had never been delivered. They were not local men. I had previously extracted their draft cards, and knew that most of them lived far away from Utah, but had worked on the trains and had coincidentally been in Marysvale on the required registration date. Their service counted as being “from Utah,” but they hadn’t lived here, no one knew them, and I can’t imagine there was any effort at all to locate them.

I made a list of the names on those unclaimed certificates, and a few days later I posted a message on the old Roots email list, narrating the background, listing the names, and giving contact information for claiming the certificates.

As far as I know, only one certificate was claimed from that posting. A woman from New Jersey, whose soldier’s name I cannot remember, wrote to tell me how excited she was to see her grandfather’s name on the list. She would never have thought to look for him in Utah, she said; he had been a railroad man, in Utah that long-ago day, with no other connection to Utah. The Marysvale people promptly sent her the certificate, and she wrote again to say that there had been a divorce and she had grown up knowing nothing of her father’s family until she started researching genealogy. This certificate was literally the only heirloom she had from that side of her family.

The Marysvale draft board had selected my grandfather and his brother – the only children of a widowed mother, sons of one of the first seven white settlers at Marysvale – to serve in the army. My great-uncle was sent to help manufacture turpentine from the pine forests of the South, an essential war product. My grandfather trained for the infantry, and was aboard a ship sailing to France when the Armistice was signed. So it isn’t like the local draft board didn’t send their own boys to war.

I haven’t analyzed the numbers, but that stack of certificates makes me wonder what proportion of the draftees were local boys, and what proportion were strangers that no one on the draft board knew. Was it easier to send someone you didn’t know, someone from back East, someone who wasn’t a boy you had watched grow up, someone who wasn’t your son’s friend, into the danger that, by 1917 when the United States entered the war, was familiar to everyone?

This centennial anniversary of the Armistice has me reviewing my files and thinking that we’ve never told even a tiny part of the story of Church members in that war. One of the stories I reviewed was that of Jens Leslie Stevenson. He, like the railroad men passing through Marysvale on registration day, was a stranger to the Pittsburgh draft board when he was snatched from his mission and sent to fill that city’s quota of draftees. Whether he was targeted specifically because he was a Mormon missionary – Pittsburgh was a particular anti-Mormon field in that era – I cannot really know. But I suppose I have no more right to be critical of Pittsburgh for sending a stranger in place of one of their own sons, without recognizing that Marysvale – and doubtless many, many other places – did the same thing.

It’s been a Few years since his story was posted at Keepa. Maybe you would enjoy rereading Jens Leslie Stevenson: Called to Serve on this particularly poignant Veterans’ Day.