What changed wasn’t the past, but my understanding of it.

The card I expected to find never appeared—not because it was lost, but because it no longer belonged where I was looking. With the archives reopened and the guidance of archivists in College Park and St. Louis, I learned something essential: the absence of the record I was seeking is not an archival failure.

It is, in fact, the answer.

The Record Series That Framed the Search

The 3×5 index cards I described belong to a specific record series:

Record Group 120, Entry 568
“Name File of Dead and Severely Wounded Casualties of Infantry Divisions in the American Expeditionary Forces, 1918.”

Archivists at College Park conducted a search of this series for soldiers of the 165th Infantry wounded on October 15, 1918.

No card for my great-grandfather was found. At first, this was disappointing news. Another locked door.

But as archivist Martin A. Gedra explained, this particular file contains cards only for those who were killed or whose wounds remained classified as severe.

That distinction matters.

Reduced to a word. Filed by fate.

A Downgraded Injury

My great-grandfather was initially reported—by the Army and by contemporary newspapers—as Severely Wounded in Action.

Later records, including his New York State World War I Service Abstract and interment documentation, show that this classification was officially amended to Moderately Wounded.

Once that downgrade occurred, his record no longer belonged in the “dead and severely wounded” casualty file.

In other words, the card I was searching for was either removed or never meant to be there in the first place.

Why Downgrades Happened

This kind of reclassification was not unusual in the final weeks of World War I.

Casualty reports near the front were made quickly, often with limited information. Soldiers wounded during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive—particularly in October 1918, when evacuation routes were strained and hospitals overwhelmed—were frequently listed as severe until their condition stabilized.

Once a wounded soldier survived the critical period, avoided amputation or fatal infection, and could be returned stateside, his status was often revised administratively.

This did not mean his injury was minor.

It meant it was survivable.

And survivability changed where the paperwork went.

Some stabilized enough to live. Never enough to forget.

In 1918, words like severely, moderately, and slightly wounded were part of a rough triage vocabulary—not a moral judgment. Near the front, a man might be labeled severely wounded when death was expected. As he stabilized, that same wound could later be reclassified as moderate, signaling survival even if pain, weakness, or disability would follow him home.

For my great-grandfather, the downgrade almost certainly marks the moment when the Army stopped expecting him to die of his wound, but not the moment when the wound stopped shaping everything that followed in his life.

Where the Record Does Exist

Archivist David R. Hardin, Supervisory Archivist at the National Archives at St. Louis, helped redirect my search to the place where surviving soldiers’ wounds were ultimately documented—not in battlefield casualty cards, but in benefits files.

Because my great-grandfather did not die in service, he never had a Burial Case File (later called an Individual Deceased Personnel File, or IDPF).

Instead, his service-connected injuries were tracked by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Specifically, his records are filed under a Deceased Veterans Claim File:

VA File No. XC-158221

These files were created to administer disability ratings and benefits. They often include medical evaluations, hospitalization summaries, disability determinations, and correspondence explaining how an injury affected a veteran’s postwar life.

This is where the Army stopped speaking in shorthand and started speaking in consequences.

From Triage to Pay Stub

After the war, agencies that became today’s VA attempted—imperfectly—to translate damage into percentages.

A 25% disability rating, like my great-grandfather’s, placed him in the middle ground: officially partially disabled, still considered employable, yet permanently impaired in ways the government acknowledged were the result of military service.

That percentage did not depend on whether an early report called his wound severe or moderate. It rested on what doctors determined his body could no longer do.

On paper, moderately wounded sounds manageable.

In family memory, it meant he was never really well again.

What This Means

The question that started this search—why was his injury downgraded from severe to moderate?—was never going to be answered by a single card.

It lives instead in a longer paper trail: one that follows a wounded soldier from battlefield, to stabilization, to demobilization, and into civilian life with a 25% service-connected disability.

The downgrade did not erase his wound.

It rerouted his story.

What Comes Next

The casualty card told me how the Army first understood my great-grandfather’s wound. The file I’m now seeking may tell me how he lived with it.

The next step is a request to the Department of Veterans Affairs for the claim file, where a battlefield injury was translated into medical judgment, disability percentages, and the limits of ordinary days.

I don’t know exactly what it will contain, or what it will leave unsaid.

But I hope it helps me better understand the shape of his injury, how it followed him home, and how it quietly shaped the rest of his life.

It is the next door I’ll knock on.

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📚 Sources & Suggested Further Reading

National Archives & Record Groups

• World War I Military Records (NARA)

• RG 120, Entry 568 (AEF Casualty Cards)

• Burial Cards of WWI Soldiers (NARA Blog)

Military Medicine & Casualties

• U.S. Army Medical Statistics, WWI

• Injuries in World War I (WWI Centennial Commission)

Veterans’ Benefits & Disability Ratings

• 1925 Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VA)

• VA Master Index File (research guide)
  

He was one of thousands sent there to help others heal.

Family lore said he had “charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt.”

Theodore Roosevelt at Camp Wikoff, 1898. Courtesy of the Montauk Library Archives.

The truth I’ve since uncovered is quieter, and somehow more profound: he served in the Hospital Corps, working in what was known as the diet kitchen—the place where healing began not through heroics, but through food.

Hospital Kitchen, Camp Wikoff, 1898. Courtesy of the Montauk Library Archives.

The diet kitchen was a field hospital innovation of its time: a small, makeshift structure run by cooks and nurses, who prepared easily digestible meals for recovering soldiers. They boiled rice, simmered broth, poached eggs, and served milk toast and weak tea to men whose stomachs had been ravaged by typhoid, dysentery, or exhaustion.

It was an act of service draped in the plain clothes of daily routine.

Joseph wasn’t storming a hill—he was stirring soup.

In the photograph above, you can see the wooden cupboards, milk pails, and stoves where field cooks like Joseph prepared the “special diets” prescribed for convalescing soldiers. It’s likely nearly identical to the kitchen where he worked, embodying a quieter kind of valor: the steady, sustaining work that keeps others alive.

Before I began tracing whether Joseph really fought alongside Roosevelt, I had never even heard of Camp Wikoff—despite being a Long Island native who has visited Montauk many times. Thanks to the remarkable team at the Montauk Library Archives, I was able to explore photographs, reports, and firsthand accounts that brought this overlooked chapter of history vividly to life.

Troops Landing at Montauk, Camp Wikoff, 1898. Courtesy of the Montauk Library Archives.

This week, the Montauk Library featured The Heirloom Detective on their Throwback Thursday blog and shared my reflections on Joseph’s service.

That collaboration reminded me how deeply our public libraries preserve our nation’s living memory—and how many stories wait quietly in the stacks, ready to be found.

“The photographs from the Montauk Library opened a window into a forgotten chapter of both national and family history. Family lore had it that my great-great-grandfather ‘charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt,’ but the archives revealed something far more human and meaningful. He was serving in the Hospital Corps at Camp Wikoff, cooking for soldiers recovering from the Spanish–American War—embodying the quiet heroism of those who did the unglamorous but essential work of war.”

In their quiet work, libraries serve too—a steadfast presence, tending the archives of our shared American past.

This Veterans Day, I’m thinking about all who have served, in every way—especially those whose contributions took place far from the front lines.

Not all heroism looks like active combat.

For countless veterans, service meant something different than facing the enemy—it meant steady labor in kitchens and hospitals, where resilience was measured by compassion and patience, not spectacle.

Joseph Ambrose Moran, Hospital Corps, Spanish–American War (1898)

To every veteran and every family who keep their memory alive, thank you.

America is an ideal we keep striving toward—one act of service at a time.

Read the Montauk Library feature: Throwback Thursday: Finding the Familiar.

Author’s Note:

I am especially indebted to Aimee Lusty at the Montauk Library for her generous assistance with this research.

Look for a longer series exploring Camp Wikoff coming soon.

This story is part of The Heirloom Detective: Lulu Mackenzie of the Archives, where history, genealogy, and remembrance intersect—and every family story finds its place.

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Early yesterday, I sent a research request to the National Archives about injuries my great-grandfather sustained on October 15, 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in World War I.

The battle, fought from September 26 to November 11, 1918, was the largest and deadliest campaign ever fought by the U.S. Army—a brutal 47-day push through the dense forests and ravines of northeastern France that helped bring the First World War to an end.

More than 1.2 million Americans took part in the offensive, advancing across a thirty-mile-wide front under relentless machine gun fire and mustard gas. In just seven weeks, 26,000 were killed and 95,000 wounded.

American troops in the Argonne Forest, Fall 1918.

A Downgraded Injury: From Severely to Moderately Wounded

I wanted help locating a single 3×5 index card that might answer a century-old question: why were my great-grandfather’s wounds, initially listed in military records and contemporaneous newspaper reports as “severe,” later downgraded to “moderate?”

“Brooklyn and Long Island Heroes Whose Names Are on the Casualty List,”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 15, 1918, p. 64.

My great-grandfather’s name is among those listed as severely wounded.

These cards are part of a record group titled “Name File of Dead and Severely Wounded Casualties of Infantry Divisions in the AEF,” and were created by the U.S. Army during World War I.

During the war, army clerks created tens of thousands of these cards—filed by division and regiment—to cable casualty reports home. On each one-sided 3×5 card, some handwritten, others typed, the war was reduced to clerical shorthand: a soldier’s name, rank, regiment, and the extent of his wounds—“severely,” “moderately,” or “slightly.”

Below are examples of the index cards I’m hoping to locate.

Each card captures, in clerical shorthand, the cost of war reduced to a word.

U.S. Army casualty cards from WWI documenting a soldier’s wounds.

Courtesy of “Name File of Dead and of Severely Wounded Casualties of Infantry Divisions in the AEF, 1918” by Constance Potter

The Mystery

One of those cards may hold the answer to a question that’s been on my mind. My great-grandfather was wounded in one of the fiercest battles the U.S. Army ever fought, just weeks before the Armistice that ended “the war to end all wars.”

So why was the degree of his injury downgraded?

Did he recover better than expected?

Did someone reclassify his wound for bureaucratic reasons—perhaps affecting his pension or standing among veterans?

What did “moderate” even mean in the language of 1918 medicine and morale?

The Shutdown

I wrote to the Archives hoping for a copy of that card. Within minutes, an automated reply appeared in my inbox:

“The National Archives and Records Administration is currently closed to normal operations due to a lapse in appropriations…”

In other words, the archives are dark. The past, for now, remains locked behind a door, and my questions will have to wait.

It’s easy to think of a government shutdown in terms of politics, but it also halts quieter forms of public service—the preservation of memory itself.

Archivists, historians, and specialists protect the raw material of truth in the form of documents that tell us who we are, where we came from, and how our institutions evolved.

Federal websites currently display closure notices during funding lapses.

For now, the archivists’ desks—and history itself—stand still.

Preserving Fragile Truths

When the archives go dark, history waits.

Birth certificates, immigration manifests, military records, pension files, war casualty cards—all of it waits in the dark until the lights come back on.

For genealogists and historians, this is more than an inconvenience; it’s a reminder of how fragile access to truth can be.

Every discovery we make depends on the infrastructure that preserves it—climate-controlled vaults, open databases, metadata systems, and the archivists who know how to navigate them.

The Bridge Between Worlds

American Army field hospital inside ruins of church in France, 1918. Perhaps my great-grandfather was here.

More than repositories, these institutions and the records they preserve are the connective tissue between generations. Each of the fragile 3×5 index cards is a record of an American’s survival, suffering, or sacrifice.

For me, the records are the only bridge between the living and the dead—between silence and knowing.

The Return

Today marks 106 years since my great-grandfather sustained what the Army first called “severe” wounds, somewhere in the war-ravaged ravines of the Argonne forest.

The current government shutdown is devastating in many urgent, visible ways—but it also reaches quietly into places most people never think about, imperiling the work of preserving history itself. On the anniversary of his injury, I find myself unable to access the very records that document it.

When the doors reopen, I’ll send my request again. Until then, I’ll keep following the trail. Because even when the archives are closed, the search never really stops.

Somewhere in the National Archives, the card that recorded my great-grandfather’s injuries is waiting to be found.

And with it is a story yet to be told.

What Comes Next

This essay marks the beginning of a broader project exploring my great-grandfather’s service in the 165th Infantry Regiment—formerly the legendary “Fighting 69th” of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division.

The regiment’s history stretches from the Irish-American volunteers of the Civil War through the muddy trenches of World War I, where it fought at Champagne, Château-Thierry, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

In the months ahead, I’ll be tracing the battles that shaped these men’s lives—following the 165th’s path through France, examining the records they left behind, and exploring how the echo of war carries through generations.

Subscribe below to follow this series and receive upcoming essays on the 165th Infantry, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and the search for the soldiers who carried its colors.

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📚 Further Reading & Context

On the Meuse-Argonne Offensive & the American Expeditionary Forces:

• The Meuse-Argonne Offensive 1918 – Brian Lane Herder

• Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I – John S. D. Eisenhower

• Over the Top: A Doughboy’s Story of the Great War – Arthur Guy Empey

On the 165th Infantry aka the “Fighting 69th:”

• A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth – Albert Ettinger

• New York State Military Museum: 69th / 165th Infantry Regiment Archives

Primary Sources & Online Collections:

• National Archives – World War I Military Records Research

• American Battle Monuments Commission

• The Doughboys

#archives #publicservice #history #familyhistory #genealogy #research #WWI #MeuseArgonne #archivesmatter #NARA #theheirloomdetective #lulumackenzieofthearchives