My husband is obsessed with genealogy. For years, he has researched his grandfather, Joseph Robert Howell, following him through records and piecing together the details of his life. He has also repeatedly tried to draw me into the project.
I usually resisted.
Names, dates, and isolated facts simply do not stick with me, and genealogy research often left me more frustrated than fascinated. But I do have one useful skill: I love old documents, and I am particularly good at reading vintage cursive handwriting—a beautiful art form that is slowly disappearing.
Recently, my husband reached a difficult point while examining the World War I Morning Reports for Battery C of the 150th Field Artillery Regiment. Many of the pages were faded and handwritten, so he asked for my help deciphering them.
I love a good challenge, and my competitive streak quickly took over. I wanted to be the first one to find something.
The Mystery of the Missing Ranks
Sitting down with the digital files, I tuned out everything around me and concentrated on finding one name: Joseph Howell.
It did not take long to find my first clue.
On October 2, 1917, a cramped handwritten entry recorded:
1st cl Pvts Lovejoy, Messner, Howell, Freyman to Corporals vice vacancy.
My husband, an Army veteran, immediately recognized the military shorthand. Joseph had been promoted from Private First Class to Corporal. The phrase “vice vacancy” was less familiar. Research showed that vice was used in military and administrative language to indicate that someone was serving in place of another person or filling a vacancy.
We had found him. That was the goal, right?
Not quite.
My husband believed there had to be more. He encouraged me to continue through the reports, particularly looking for references to injuries, illness, or hospitalization.
A few nights later, unable to sleep, I opened the records again. Only five days after Joseph’s promotion, an entry dated October 7, 1917, revealed an unexpected change:
Corp Joseph Howell reduced to Pvt S.O. 25.
Joseph had been reduced from Corporal to Private, leaving us with an obvious question: Why had he been promoted and then reduced in rank only five days later?
The entry cited “S.O. 25,” referring to Special Order No. 25. The Morning Report recorded the action but did not explain the circumstances behind it. Finding that order—and discovering what happened—became another research question for another day.
For the moment, we kept going.
Joining the “Rainbow”
As I worked through the daily reports, I began to see something beyond Joseph’s individual entries. The records were documenting the movements and transformation of an entire military organization.
Near the end of October 1917, the reports recorded the unit’s movement from Long Island, New York, across the Atlantic and eventually to Camp de Coëtquidan, France.
Research into the unit’s history gave those movements greater meaning. The 150th Field Artillery had originated as an Indiana National Guard organization before entering federal service during World War I. It became part of the 42nd Division, better known as the “Rainbow Division.”
The division brought together National Guard units from states across the country. Its nickname has long been associated with Douglas MacArthur, then a young Army officer, and the idea that the division’s units stretched across the United States like a rainbow.
Suddenly, the places and dates in the Morning Reports were no longer simply entries on a page. They were tracing Joseph’s movement from Indiana to New York and then overseas as part of the American war effort in France.
On November 21, 1917, Joseph appeared again:
1st cl Pvt Thomas J Cavanaugh and Private Joseph Howell from Pvts to Corporals R.S.O. 26 11/20/17.
Joseph was a Corporal again.
This time the entry cited “R.S.O. 26,” a Regimental Special Order dated November 20. Once again, the Morning Report documented the personnel action while pointing us toward another potentially valuable record.
Mules, Machinery, and 155mm Howitzers
By winter, I had begun to understand the structure of the Morning Reports themselves. What had initially looked like pages of nearly indecipherable handwriting and numbers had developed a pattern.
The reports tracked the unit’s strength and status while also recording changes involving individual soldiers.
Joseph appeared again during the winter:
December 27, 1917: Corp Joseph Howell fr. D to SK in Hosp.
He had gone from duty to sick in hospital.
Then, on January 6, 1918:
Corp Howell fr SK in Hosp to D.
He had returned from the hospital to duty.
As the unit continued its service in France, another part of the reports caught my attention: the accounting of horses and mules.
The numbers were not incidental. Artillery units depended heavily upon animals for transportation. The 150th Field Artillery eventually operated French-designed 155mm Schneider howitzers, heavy artillery pieces that required substantial logistical support.
The Morning Reports helped reveal that logistical side of the war. Horses and mules had to be maintained, replaced, fed, and cared for. Soldiers were needed to handle them and keep the battery functioning.
What initially appeared to be mundane accounting began to tell another story. A field artillery regiment was not simply a collection of soldiers and guns. It was an enormous moving system of men, animals, equipment, ammunition, and supplies.
By the summer of 1918, however, the tone of the records changed.
More entries began recording soldiers who had been wounded or killed. The administrative language remained brief and unemotional, but the reality behind it was unmistakable.
At one point I encountered another soldier named Howell who had been killed in action. He was a transfer and apparently unrelated to our family, but seeing the name stopped me for a moment.
By then, these were no longer simply names in an old ledger.
Wounded During the Meuse-Argonne Offensive
During the autumn of 1918, the 42nd Division participated in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, part of the massive final Allied operations of the war.
Then came the entry we had been hoping—and perhaps dreading—to find.
On October 18, 1918, Joseph’s name appeared again:
Corp Joseph R. Howell 143910 slightly wounded in right arm. Hospital not known.
Another entry provided an additional detail:
Injuries caused by enemies’ bombs.
For the first time, we had a contemporary military record documenting not only that Joseph had been wounded, but when he was wounded, where on his body he was injured, and what the Army recorded as the cause.
The Morning Reports do not tell us precisely what happened on the battlefield or the exact circumstances in which Joseph received the wound. Those questions require additional records. But the brief entries establish something that family stories alone could not: Joseph was wounded while his unit was serving in France during the final weeks of World War I.
He survived, but he subsequently disappeared from the battery’s active roster.
On November 25, 1918, two weeks after the Armistice, Joseph’s name appeared among soldiers recorded as:
dropped fr Rolls per GO 111, GHQAEF 1918.
The notation referred to General Order No. 111 issued by General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces. Understanding exactly how that order applied to Joseph—and what happened to him after he left the battery’s rolls—opened yet another avenue of research.
The Morning Reports had answered one question while creating several more.
That, I was beginning to learn, is genealogy.
Where History Meets the Heart
Discovering the date and circumstances of Joseph’s wound changed the way I looked at these records.
I could begin to picture the world behind the handwriting: France, the artillery batteries, the horses and mules, the hospitals, and the men whose names appeared for only a line or two before disappearing from the pages.
I have never considered myself a military historian. If someone had told me a month earlier that I would spend nights studying century-old Army Morning Reports, I probably would have laughed.
But somewhere along the way, Joseph Howell stopped being merely my husband’s grandfather.
He became a young soldier whose movements I could follow through records created more than a century ago. I could watch him gain rank, lose it, regain it, become sick, return to duty, go into combat, suffer a wound, and eventually disappear from his unit’s rolls.
The records did not tell us everything. In many ways, they created as many questions as they answered.
But they brought him to life.
That may be what finally made me understand why my husband loves genealogy so much.
Our ancestors cannot sit across the table and tell us what happened to them. What remains are the traces they left behind—photographs, letters, government records, military reports, newspapers, and sometimes a nearly illegible line of cursive handwriting buried in a century-old ledger.
If we take the time to read those records carefully, the names and dates begin to become something more.
They become people.
And sometimes, while searching for their stories, we discover a little more about our own.
Nomadic Roots Research 