A French treasure hunter found an abandoned U.S. dog tag in 2012 that had been buried for nearly 100 years in a farm pasture where American forces had camped during World War I, an area that was known as the “mud camp.”
This unexpected discovery started a quest to reunite the dog tag with the descendants of the soldier in America.
The U.S. Army camp was located near the village of Glonville, France, on what is now a farm. Jean Claude Fonderlick often hunted old artifacts in this field on weekends and holidays with his trusty metal detector, looking for artifacts left behind from this large WWI camp.
He collected or sold most of the stuff he found: buttons, shell casings, knives, buckles and anything else that thousands of soldiers might drop or throw away in war.
When he dug up the American dog tag, Fonderlick considered it far too valuable to stash in a drawer or sell. He instead wanted to reconnect it with any living descendants he could find.
However, his English was poor, and he didn’t know how to navigate the U.S. government's record-keeping labyrinth, so he asked a friend if he knew of anybody stateside who might help.
The friend asked a friend who asked another friend who asked a buddy and so on. Finally, an American author was contacted who said, "Oh I know Ron Franscell is a journalist and author who does a lot of research. Let's ask him!"
When Franscell, a New York Times best-selling crime writer and Wyoming native, was told about the proposed plan, he felt that it could be one of the most important volunteer projects he had ever undertaken, so he agreed.
What followed was a Wyoming tag-team effort to return a single dog tag to the family of U.S. Army Pvt. John J. Scott of Kansas.
Returned Home
Eventually, the men would reunite seven World War I dog tags to their respective communities as Fonderlick continued to find more dog tags and other artifacts in the field of the infamous mud camp.
According to Franscell, these dog tags that Fonderlick had found were simple, stamped metal discs. They were worn on leather thongs or strings that often broke in the stressful, wet, violent environment of war, and would then be lost in the muck.
“None of the dog tags he found had been lost when the soldiers were killed,” Franscell said. “Most of these men had returned home, started families and careers, and done some extraordinary things.”
In the process of his research, Franscell heard wonderful family stories and met some very grateful people who were astonished to receive this little piece of metal that their grandad or great-grandad had worn in a war 100 years before.
Franscell described World War I as a collision of old school strategy and tactics. Soldiers were being mowed down by technology in a horrific scene. The mud they were mired in made their situation even worse.
“There is a human component to this war,” he said. “These are not just ghosts, but real people. It made this project worth doing, and that's why I did it.”
Metal Detector Treasures
Franscell describes Fonderlick as just a normal guy who is a software developer, and his hobby is metal detecting. He marks each find with a GPS coordinate, which is not always a war artifact.
Fonderlick had found one dog tag 19 inches deep. One foot east of that spot and another 20 inches down, he found two Roman coins.
“It is fascinating, because in 1918 a kid loses his dog tag on that spot, and then 2,000 years before, probably Roman soldiers on that same spot, dropped some coins,” Franscell said. “That's history that in the United States we have a hard time calculating, because we don't have that many years in our history.”
The mud camp had a reputation as a horrible site.
Despite this, thousands of soldiers camped there and ultimately, lost a lot of stuff in the mud. A century later, Fonderlick got permission from the farmers to search the field, and most of what he found were rusty artifacts from World Wars I and II.
It was the idea of reconnecting an artifact to the modern family that intrigued Franscell and drew him into the dog tag project. Many of the families he eventually contacted didn’t even know that their grandfather or great-grandfather had even served in the Great War.
“It's interesting to be able to hand them this little piece of metal that has been lost and is part of their family history,” he said.
Search For The Scott Family
Each dog tag has a name, a number and typically the rank and soldier’s unit. That information is usually enough to discover the soldier’s descendants.
In 2018, Fonderlick had found the dog tag of someone named John J. Scott.
The name was so common that Franscell ran into a brick wall and was unable to locate the correct family. He had found several John Scott’s, but not this particular soldier who had been at the French mud camp in 1918.
Franscell was so desperate that he posted on Facebook and asked if there was anybody out there who wanted to take a shot at finding the family.
Since he is originally from Casper, he had several Wyoming Facebook friends who connected him with forensic genealogist Carla Edwards, also of Casper. She was able to quickly find the right Scott and then found his descendants within just a couple of hours.
“Carla does this professionally and has access to better tools than I do,” Franscell said. “She worked her magic, and it turned out beautifully with her help. I can't praise her skills and her magic enough. It was really spectacular, and clearly it led to us being able to reconnect that little piece of metal with a real family.”
Edwards has recently retired as a forensic genealogist where she would find descendants for the oil fields and present her findings to the court. However, she is always up for a challenge when it’s for a good cause.
“I don't charge for this kind of work,” Edwards said. “I'm always happy to return dog tags or Purple Hearts and things of sentimental value.”
To find the correct John Scott, Carla first looked through American military records and began to follow his trail.
She was looking for clues such as a draft card that would tell her what unit Scott might have been assigned to, or where he was drafted geographically. This would at least give her a start to locate previous records to his life and his family.
“I am going backwards to develop a clear path forward,” she said. “If it turns into a dead end, then you also have to have the ability to develop other leads in thinking that there's always another way, and what can I do to find that information?”
She searches through any available records including official and unofficial government records. She cautions that some are hearsay that a researcher will need to be able to weave through to develop a person's life story. This includes census records which are often incorrect and based on whatever a person answering a door may have answered at the time.
A Family Reunion
This particular dog tag that had lay hidden in the dirt of a French field for 100 years belonged to U.S. Army Pvt. John J. Scott, a Kansas doughboy who lost his identification tag in the mud camp near the village of Glonville, France, in 1917-18, where he was a wagon-driver for the 42nd Division’s 117th Ammunition Train.
Scott had returned to the U.S. after the war and started a family. With Carla's genealogy help, they found Pvt. Scott’s grandson, Riley Robinson of San Antonio, Texas, and returned the dog tag to the surprised family.
“I can't think of a single one of them who knew anything about grandpa or great grandpa,” Franscell said. “They maybe knew he was in the service, but in many cases, they had never even met the person. He was ghost. He was a story. He wasn't real to them.”
The Soldiers
To Franscell, discovering the stories of the soldiers has been especially meaningful. These little discs suddenly become more than just a piece of metal, but stories of young soldiers who survived World War I to return home.
Another of the dog tags that had been recovered was that of another young Kansas boy, Frank Hagaman. He had enlisted in 1917 and rose to the rank of sergeant before he was wounded in 1918 and sent home.
After the war, he went to law school and eventually got involved in statewide politics.
In 1948, he was elected the lieutenant governor of Kansas. When the sitting governor replaced Kansas’s outgoing U.S. senator in 1950, Hagaman became governor of Kansas for 41 days until a new governor was elected.
Hagaman was an only child who married a woman who was an only child, and they had no children, so there were no direct or close descendants when he died in 1966. His lost dog tag, found in 2017 in France, was donated to his hometown Johnson County Museum in Overland Park, Kansas.
U.S. Army Pfc. Joe Graiper was a 17-year-old Eastern European immigrant working in the iron mines of Michigan when he enlisted.
He was camped with the 1st Division when he lost his dog tag, but was later killed in action at the 1918 Battle of Soissons. Today, he is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery near Fere-en-Tardenois, France.
His tag was donated to the 1st Division’s museum in Illinois.
Not all dog tags make their way home.
A farm boy, Eugene Hanner joined the Alabama National Guard, which fought in World War I with the 42nd Division (Rainbow Division). He came home sometime after he lost his dog tag and died in North Carolina in 1969.
Efforts to contact his surviving grandchildren, who likely deemed it a scam, have so far been unsuccessful.
The families who are reunited with these dog tags receive a gift from a close ancestor that they otherwise knew nothing about, making that person real for the first time.
“History has a lot of purposes, you know, not just what we learn and don't learn from it, but also to bring people back to life, even if its only briefly,” Franscell said.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.