Tool:
Today’s tool is Fold 3, a repository of military documents that I have access to through my Ancestry membership. (It requires the most expensive subscription, but for the duration of my work on this part of the book, the various databases and other features make that make sense for me.) The most interesting thing in this database, for me, is the availability of draft cards. And in searching them, I found… a mystery?
What I Found:
I was able to find my grandfather’s draft card, and the draft cards of his brothers, with no problem, and in a few days I’ll post about one of the ways in which these cards point to an interesting issue in parsing questions of Jewish belonging in the US. But for today, I want to show you a set of artifacts that, quite frankly, confound me.
First, my grandfather’s draft card and registry report:
All of this looks good and right to me. I’m certain that this is Granddaddy’s actual draft card and that there are no irregularities.
But this record also exists on Fold 3 for an Albert Polan:
This one really puzzled me. Those are—in part but not in whole—his father Lake Sr.’s details. Bertha was Lake’s wife, and my grandfather’s mother. And both this Albert Polan and my great-grandfather were born in areas then occupied by Russia (and Lake’s place of birth is cited differently on different records, so it wouldn’t be surprising for it to be cited as yet another place in what was then Russia here.)
But that sure looks like Granddaddy’s signature; enough so that I started digging into the records a little more carefully.
What at first seemed like a mystery now seems like maybe just a very bizarre set of coincidences.
There is a record of the death of this second Albert Polan with an uncanny similarity to my grandfather in the Social Security Death Index:
I also found the Bertha Polan who might well have been married to, rather than the mother of, this Albert Polan. They were married in Cook County, IL on January 30th, 1936. Here is her obituary.
She had two sons: Benjamin Rosenberg and Sidney Polan. Does that second name sound familiar to you? If you’re family or a personal friend, I’m sure it does. It’s my mother’s name, and was also my grandfather’s middle name.
There is actually a lot of information available for both this Albert Polan and for his wife Bertha Shaffer Polan (my great-grandmother’s maiden name was Handler), so they clearly aren’t made up people.
But I can’t get over how similar the signatures are:
Of all the coincidences, that’s the one that still has me scratching my head.
Here’s my theory on the similar signatures. Both we’re educated in similar situations, learned script from similar textbooks, and thus have similar signatures.