Week 31: Brother #52Ancestors — Making Sense of it All

My husband’s grandfather had two brothers and one sister and this story about his brother Frank has intrigued me for some time. Here is a shortened version.

Like his father and his brothers, Frank worked for The St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad (also known as the FRISCO) and when drafted for World War I, the army designated him a train engineer. Assigned to Company A, Standard Railway and Bridge Construction Regiment, 52ndEngineer Combat Battalion, Frank arrived in France in June of 1918.[1] We have some of the letters he wrote home during his deployment and while I think he liked the actual job he did (it appears he saw no battles), he constantly complained of being lonely and that nobody from home ever wrote.

Despite his professed loneliness, when peace came, Frank volunteered for the North Russian Expedition, a strange and little-known venture involving U.S. troops fighting alongside the Imperial Russian army. Called in by the British in September of 1918, American forces were used to prevent a German advance on the Eastern Front. However, once the war against Germany ended, the U.S. forces wound up fighting against the Bolsheviks. Calling themselves “Polar Bears,” the American troops used a polar bear on their regimental crests.[2]

Newly promoted to Sergeant, 1stClass, Frank joined the 167thCompany of the North Russian Transportation Corps in April of 1919.[3] He and his men were assigned to maintain and operate the Murmansk railroad in far northwest Russia.[4] For those of us who are geographically-challenged, Murmansk is close to Finland and northwest Norway, about 15 miles from the Artic Ocean.

As you can imagine, with the war against Germany over, many of these men started to question why they were still fighting. Morale among the troops was low even before Frank and his men arrived.[5] However, the pictures I’ve seen show the men trying to make the best of it. Indeed, four of the “Polar Bears” who came with the expedition as interpreters wound up marring local women.[6]

Frank arrived home to Monett, Missouri on August 28, 1919 and ten days later, he and his long-time girl, Antoinette Marie Dwyer, were married.[7] They had their first child on March 27, 1920 and it doesn’t take a mathematician to recognize this less-than-pristine birth date. While they went on to have more children, Frank continued to question his first son’s parentage. The marriage appears to have suffered greatly from mistrust and suspicion. Frank died on August 2, 1925 in Fresno, California, under the alias of A.T. Carter.[8] He left his wife and three children ages five and under. No pictures of Frank as an adult can be found but John E. Wilson, who wrote The Artic Antics of the North Russia Transportation Corps, took many photos which were digitized by The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and I’ve attached a few for your enjoyment.

[1]“W.J. Mills received a message,” The Monett (Missouri) Weekly Times, 28 June 1918, p. 4, col. 3.

[2]The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan has the largest collection of manuscript and printed materials on the Polar Bear Expedition. See: https://bentley.umich.edu.

[3]“Polar Bear Expedition History,” Bentley Historical Library (https://bentley.umich.edu/research/catalogs-databases/polar-bear/polar-bear-expedition-history/: accessed 1 August 2019).

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid.

[6]John E. Wilson, “How We Came to Be,” The Artic Antics of the North Russia Transportation Corps Expedition of the U.S. Army (Salina, Kansas: Padgett’s Printing House, 1919; reprint, Lexington, Kentucky: The Bentley Historical Library, 2015), 7th page.

[7]“Dwyer-Mills,” The Monett (Missouri) Times, 12 September 1920, p. 4, co. 4.

[8]California, Department of Public Health, standard certificate of death no. 25-036396 (1925), Wm. Mills alias A.T. Carter; California Department of Public Health, Sacramento, California.