American Cemeteries Memorializing U.S. Soldiers

My research of the Christian Monath family has been an interesting yet time consuming, adventure!  Not that I am complaining, but maybe my husband has thoughts on this.  I spend too much time on the computer and driving to places to spend more time than I find information.  But that is research, right?

Last Friday he and I visited the Maryland State Archives.  After several hours on their database, we came home with about eight death certificates.  Yes, just eight.  There is a saying, all good things take time.

When adding the death certificate information to my database, I looked closer at my great uncle Augustus Monath's life.  I learned that his youngest son, Walter August Monath, died while serving in the   U. S. Army during the First World War. Needing to know more, I checked Ancestry.com and then did a Google search.  The search led me to a website that features records of approximately 200,000 U.S. servicemen who were killed or missing in action during World War 1, World War 2, and Korean Conflict and buried or memorialized on foreign soil.

Walter served as Sergeant in the U. S. Army, 19th Field Artillery Regiment, 5th Division and is buried in the St. Mihiel American Cemetery in the St. Mihiel American Cemetery, Thiaucourt, St. Mihiel, France.  His grave site is noted down to the row and plot. He was born in August of 1897, and killed in action on September 26, 1918.  

I came another step closer to learning about my Monath family. 

Social Media and Genealogy Research

I violated the one social media rule that I lived by when I worked, and it was regularly making updates to blogs.  My Monath family genealogy blog was severely neglected, and, honestly, I have reasonably sound excuses.

• After one false alarm and the real deal, we became grandparents to our 5th grandson.
• Helped two sons move into their new homes.
• Our home vegetable garden is now done for the season, and weeds pulled where they once rooted in my flower gardens.
• Most importantly of all, I am realizing that the Monath family descendants are slowly dying out and difficult to find.  

I began and started this project so often, and this past July got serious enough to stick with it.  While preparing my research list for a trip to the Maryland Archives, I took another look at the newspaper clippings (obituaries), and to my surprise found a living Monath descendant on Facebook.  So I sat and deliberated over 'do I or don't I contact this lady' and 'will I regret not contacting this person later'?

So, I will take a chance and hope that this person is also researching her family roots, and will contact me when she sees this picture that I found among my parents' photos.

This is one picture of my mom and dad's photographs that I thought was really cute!  On the back, the name Phillis (aka Phyllis) M. Monath is written with the date of 24 April 1938.  That is all that I knew for a long time.  Until today.

Using U. S. Federal Census reports and newspaper clippings that were found at the York County Heritage Trust, I am 99% sure that her name is Phyllis M. Monath-Emgee, daughter of William Wesley Monath and Mary Elizabeth Sullivan-Monath.  Grandparents would have been William H. Monath and Ida May Yingling.

So, I think that I will sit on this for a bit and hope that the lady who is on Facebook might see this and make the first move.  I by no means am posting this photograph for no other reason but to make a connection. 


Finding two bits of information, no matter how small or insignificant, makes for a satisfactory day of research.

Thanks for reading!