While researching his city’s war dead, Massachusetts Post 132 member finds listing, photos of his city’s WWI servicemembers.
While stationed for a few years in Italy, Naval Reservist Matthew Sargent developed an interest in learning about those residents of his hometown – Marlborough, Mass. – who fought in World War II and were buried in the Sicily–Rome American Cemetery near Anzio.
He asked around Marlborough while home and got a few names, but he wanted to know more, such as what units they served with and if there were any photos. Unable to get much in the way of information, he started doing his own research.
That was 2011, but Sargent’s curiosity hasn’t waned since. In fact, it’s gotten stronger, to the point where he’s researching all of Marlborough’s natives who died while in service to the nation, spanning the French and Indian War to KIAs from 2021. “It’s just grown over the years into this pretty good project, I think,” he said.
His efforts in learning more about the city’s World War I veterans got a boost recently, thanks to a visit to the attic in Akroyd Houde Post 132 in Marlborough. There, Sargent found two famed pictures: one a collection of vignettes of almost every Marlborough World War I veteran, and one that provides details of the births and deaths of those veterans, including their place of death if they were killed during the war. The pictures had been donated to the post in 1920; the list of names is thought to have been written using calligraphy by a woman named Mazie Kane Wells.
His great great-uncle had been a member of Post 132, which led to Sargent joining the post. He reached out to Post Commander Mike Ferro for access to the attic.
“Something just kind of told me there was something there,” said the 33-year-old Sargent, who still serves in the Naval Reserves and is the chief engineer for the Prudential Center in Boston. “I don’t really know what it was. I just had a feeling there was something there.”
Sargent said he initially encountered “junk” before finding the two photos. But frustration turned to elation. “It was like a bunch of Christmases together,” he said. “I’ve been researching these guys for close to a decade. To be able to put a face to a name after reading about them for so long … and even trying to get in touch with some of the families of the guys … to be able to put faces to the names for some of the families is really great, too.”
That Sargent has been able to contact some relatives to the names and faces on the pictures “is a really rewarding aspect of this research,” he said. “It’s just very rewarding to be able to fill that gap in for people. To be able to fill that story in is even better. I think people are interested.”
Sargent said he spent a good part of the pandemic researching Marlborough’s World War II servicemembers, working with another person to create family trees to try to locate living relatives. He admits he will need to eventually wrap up the project.
“I need to make a stopping point. I don’t know how deep in the weeds I’ll get,” he said. “But hopefully other people will take a chance and go look and take a peak not only in their attic, but their Legion attic … because I think there’s a lot of treasures out there that really tell a story of people. If we don’t find them, they might just kind of go by the wayside.”
- Honor & Remembrance