A Tale of Two Grandfathers

James Thomas Cheshire (1901 - 1941)

Yesterday I spent the day at the Bahia Hotel on Mission Bay with about one hundred family members of POW/Missing Military Personnel.  We all received a briefing from dozens of dedicated employees of the US Military and the Department of Defense whose mission is to identify and bring home the remains of American servicemen and women.  Of the 359,000 US fatalities during World War II, 73,000 bodies were never found or identified.  My grandfather James Thomas Cheshire USN CPHM  is one of those Americans.

I have been an amateur genealogist since 1991 when I visited my grandfather's home town of New Hope, KY in an effort to honor his life by researching his family history.  Standing at a Xerox machine in the public library in Bardstown, KY, I looked up to see a plaque on the wall with my grandfather's name on it.  It was a memorial to the servicemen from Nelson County, KY who had lost their lives in WWII.

Years later, I returned to Kentucky to do more research and I found a book compiled by local historians to honor the fallen servicemen of Nelson County, KY.  I was stunned to find the illustration to the left in the book.  I contacted the authors and they confirmed that the illustration was commissioned for the book after finding local newspaper reports from 1942 that referenced a letter from the USS Oklahoma captain explaining the circumstances of my grandfather's death.  I am working with DoD historian Heather Harris (who I met yesterday) to locate this letter.  I will be traveling to Washington DC on Thursday with my great friend Myles Thurman to attend the presidential inauguration and to search for records pertaining to my grandfather's death at the National Archives.  Confirming this story is one of the ways I can honor his sacrifice and preserve his memory.  But it also contributes to a more complete portrait of his personality and how his character may have infuenced my father and his sister and how their family dynamic may have influenced the lives of his nine grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.

One of the reasons my Grandpa Cheshire's personality is so intriguing to me is because my maternal grandpa - William Jasmagy - was also an American hero but in an entirely different way.  He bravely followed his conscience as a pacifist and was sent to prison as a conscientious objector during World War I.  A piano teacher by profession, after he was imprisoned with fellow CO's at Fort Riley, KS in 1918, my 21-year-old grandmother Frieda Ledermann set out from Brooklyn to Kansas to support her fiancee, the other CO's and their philosophy of non-violence.  Their marriage license (right) documents their wedding ceremony in the guard shack of the prison.  Grandma Frieda is also a brave American hero.  Her letters home are preserved as part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.  In a book titled "A World Without War: How U.S Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I"by Frances H. Early, my grandma's efforts to support the WWI CO's are documented and she is described by a fellow pacifist as "a lovely girl....plucky and resourceful."  My Grandpa Jasmagy's beliefs are also documented in this book in his own words: "The present temporary lapse into hatred, viciousness and passionate intolerance, festered by a subjugation of the people and stimulated through a perversion of truth and ideals, may cause my position to be misjudged, but in this I will experience no feelings of resentment; instead I will rest content in that inward compensation, knowing I retained my manhood and had lived to help promote among mankind the kingdom of love and good will, and that in time, my stand will be vindicated by posterity."

William Jasmagy (# 8, Ft. Douglas)