User:WWI History Guy

Hello my name is Joe Hartwell and I’m an amateur historical researcher. My core area of research is with the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps Regiments that served in France during the First World War and also the United States Navy from 1905 through 1930.

I had actually started this area of research back in 1997 when I began to re-discover who my grandfather was. As a kid my grandfather had a special way of telling stories of his days of old and I could listen for hours. After his death in 1981 I was left with a shoe box full of old photos documents and the like from his time serving with the United States Army Ordnance Department in World War One. The shoe box sat on a shelf in a closet until one day in 1997 when I began to look through it and then all the stories he had told came back into my memory.

To make a long story short I began to research online into the history of the United States Army in World War One. At the time there seemed to be very little detailed history online about World War One and especially about the Coast Artillery Corps Regiments. I knew that grandfather had served in an Ordnance unit attached to a Coast Artillery Corps Regiment that had seen combat on the front lines during the war. And I also knew that one of the only pieces to the puzzle of what his story was during the war began at Camp Dodge, Iowa. This was the place he was stationed at for his basic training.

This was then where I started my research project at. I had found three telephone numbers that were connected with the current National Guard base at Camp Dodge and blindly called the first and second number, which I had with no answers on either number. The third number I had was as I found out the phone number for the historical museum located at Camp Dodge.

I spoke to a man named Jerry Gordon who was very helpful to me. Before we hung up I asked him if he was a volunteer there at the museum and he said yes, he was and he also told me he was a retired Brigadier General. From the information he had given me I was able to begin my research project into what my grandfather had experienced during the war. I began to research his unit that he was attached to, which was the 56th Artillery Regiment, of the Coast Artillery Corps. And I also began to research each of the Regiments that went to France. Along with that I began to research each Navy ship that these regiments sailed on to and from France.

After I put up my first web page which was on the Rootsweb web site I began to be contacted by people who like me were searching for their relatives who had served in these Artillery Regiments or aboard one of the several navy ships. To me it was like a big puzzle I had a few pieces and the folks who contacted me had even more pieces. But I did not have a box top with the completed picture to go by. As I began to assemble all the bits of history I began to develop a larger picture of the history of what these units did during the war. And along with it also came another image that of who the men were that had experienced this historical event in our collective military history.

But even more than that along the way I began to discover that these men, all of whom are now passed into the pages of history, had did something that I was using in the present moment. The something was my Freedom, they had paid for my Freedom and your Freedom which we take for granted sometimes. Through the countless stories I have researched throughout the years I have come to know and love this Freedom and have learned the true cost of that payment for our Freedom.

Since I myself have not served in uniform this is my way of repaying these men who had served in uniform during a time in our history in which their services were needed. This then has become an ongoing tribute to what they had done to pay their share of Freedoms bill.