In a previous post entitled WWI Army Pay Card I spoke about using the veteran burial record for my great uncle to find his Army Serial Number (ASN). I used that info to finally successfully order his WWI records from the National Archives.
The source I used was the U.S. National Cemetery Interment Control Forms, 1928-1962 database on Ancestry.com. Great uncle Michael died in 1936, so I was very glad when that database went online- I had every other piece of information on Michael short of his ASN and his shoe size, but NARA kept replying to my records requests with “not enough info.”
Just a month or so later, a researcher in Ireland contacted me about my grandfather’s first wife, Sabina Gilroy, whom he found in my tree. This cousin of my cousins has shared a great deal on a part of our tree that was bereft, which has been wonderful.
It turns out Sabina’s brother Michael was also a WWI veteran, but he died in service a few weeks before the war ended.
So, you’d think the Interment Control Forms database would be out since he died 10 years before 1928, no?
No. It turns out that groups of veterans were disinterred from their original burial places overseas and reburied back in the US.
Michael Gilroy was moved from a cemetery near the battle in Meuse-Argonne back to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn some time after 1928.
So, now we have his interment card, his ASN and a way to now find his records at NARA.
