Finding Uncle Joe
After watching “Pearl Harbor” and “Saving Private Ryan”, I started thinking about my Dad’s youngest brother, Uncle Joe. He was the only member of our family who served in WWII. Thinking about him brought back childhood memories of a cocky, skinny, dark-haired, 22- year old sailor from the Port Richmond section
of Philadelphia whose Navy escapades we followed around the South Pacific. I decided I needed to find him.

From 1942 – 1945, newspaper headlines screamed of U. S. casualties in sea battles won and lost. The U.S.S. Yorktown was torpedoed and sunk. Ships like the U. S. S. Enterprise fought the Japanese in the waters off unrecognizable islands of Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Midway. My three brothers and I stuck flag stickpins in a world map hanging on our Wilmington recreation room wall, next to Mom’s old piano where
she loved to sit and play. We tracked Uncle Joe’s onboard ship progress from 1942 until the end of WWII when he returned safely home.

My Uncle Joe was my sole link to “the war to end all wars.” He was my Dad’s kid brother but, because of a family disagreement in the ‘50’s, we lost contact with him. Now, it became imperative that I find him. The Internet was my starting point. My search began.

“Family quarrels are little things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches and wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald from

Using www.teldir.com (international phone directory) I used the white pages to find a person. I typed in his first and last name, left the city blank and used NJ, his last known address. I got five names and addresses. With five postcards in hand, I wrote short messages to each Joseph asking if he’d lived in Philadelphia and had been
in the Navy.“Were your parents John and Catherine (Kate) and did you have an older brother in Wilmington?” I gave my mailing and email addresses and waited.Two weeks later, I got an email from Denise who wrote, “We got your postcard and my great-grandparents were John and Catherine M. of Philadelphia. My Dad, Joseph,
had an Uncle Joe. My grandfather was Charles with an older brother, John, who lived in Wilmington. My Dad’s sister Mary has been doing some genealogy and I will forward your message to her.” Bingo!

My cousin Mary O. emailed me saying she would like to work together to find the family. She reminded me that our Dads had three sisters, Mary, Martha and Rita, whose husbands were all in the service. I remembered
Rita’s husband’s name and that they’d lived in Carlisle, PA. Back to the internet to find some addresses. I mailed five postcards and waited for a response.Two weeks later, I received a greeting card from a 97-year old widow who wrote, “I got your card and am sorry to tell you that Rita passed away several years ago. I will give you her husband’s name, address and phone number. My husband died in 1974 but I list his name in phone book to avoid any strange calls. I’m his widow, going on 97. I still love him. He was one of the best. Rita’s husband could give you more on history. She was so sweet and I loved her very much. She and Jim would visit us often. Jim often said when he met her, “You look like my Aunt Hulda.” (Signed, my best luck, Hilda D.)

More success, all due to this sweet widow who took the time to answer my postcard. We now had a living relative who could be contacted for more names and addresses. Jim was a brother-in-law to Uncle Joe and had also served in WWII. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men.” The nursery rhyme bounced around in my head, but with a renewed spirit I continued to try putting the family back together again.Cousin Mary emailed me with the good news and the bad news. Uncle Jim D. didn’t keep addresses and said hadn’t heard from Uncle Joe in over ten years. He suggested Mary contact his daughter, Rita. Rita said she did have some names and addresses of other cousins and family members and mailed them to Mary.

Cousin Mary already had done some preliminary work including locating various census records and church marriage certificate which listed date, place and witnesses to our grandparents’ wedding. We contacted Aunt Mary’s daughters. They didn’t know their mother had older brothers. We mailed Joanie and Dee copies of photographs of their mother and Aunt Martha that they hadn’t seen. Before this, they had no pictures of their mother as a young child. Yet there they were. My Dad and his brother, Charlie, with their mother and her sister,
Martha, beautifully dressed as young children, formally posing for the studio photographer in happier days.

Aunt Martha had died of heart disease three years after having baby Joey. Her widowed husband had returned to, Cleveland, his hometown, to raise Joey among relatives. Again, I located possible men and addressed postcards asking if he had served in the Navy in Philadelphia, listing his nickname and Martha’s nickname. A letter arrived from a town near Cleveland stating that her fatherin- law had died and left her husband snapshots
of Joey and his mother, and with people he did not recognize. He had no one to ask. After viewing the copies of the pictures, we knew we had found our cousin, Joey. Joey’s wife, Susan, wrote she had a Mass card for someone they did not know. It was for Kieran D. of Stawell. I googled “Stawell”, thinking it was a town in Ireland. Instead it was in Australia. We knew my grandmother’s brother had immigrated to Australia, instead of America, so this had to be our granduncle, whose name and address had been lost over the years.

Through the internet, I located Stawell’s Historical Society and asked if they had any information about the family. She responded, “He was one of the early settlers and helped build St. Patrick’s Church. For a fee, we can make copies if you’d like.”After ordering the copies, she added, “His granddaughter, Liz, volunteershere. Would you like to speak to her” And so, a new friendship was born with my second cousin. We have written each other and had the opportunity to meet and spend 3 days together a couple years ago in San Diego when she was visiting the states with a friend. Uncle Joe had moved to Florida and was deceased. However, Cousin Mary met his grown children in Florida when she was wintering there a few years ago. My original search was for Uncle Joe and we found him.

But the search was more than successful. It resulted in finding not only our whole family but our newly iscovered, extended family in Australia who had even saved old letters written in the ‘40’s by my Dad’s brothers
and sisters and mailed them to me.We think if they had lived longer, (my Dad died at age 57), they would have resolved their differences and become a family again. All the original family members are deceased. I am reminded of a stanza by James Joyce in “Finnegan’s Wake”:
“We lived and laughed
And loved and left.”

Marge Guziak is a Philadelphia-born freelance writer who grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, vacationed in Wildwood and lives with her husband on almost four acres of land in western Colorado. You can reach the author at mrguziak@frontier.net