The GRS was not responsible for the original burial. 6 The first Graves Registration unit reached France on October 31, 1917. On August 7, 1917, War Department General Order 104 authorized the organization of a Graves Registration Service. As soon as the AEF landed in France in June, the problem of caring for the dead became an immediate concern. The problem of burying the dead only expanded with U.S. With the Spanish-American War in 1898, the first foreign war following the Civil War, the War Department expanded these procedures to include the return of the bodies of the men who died overseas. The records that describe Katherine Holley's trip to France and her husband's death and interment are among the Burial Files and Graves Registration records in the Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General (Record Group 92).ĥ During the Civil War, the military first developed procedures to identify and bury the dead, both Union and Confederate. On June 10, 1920, the Graves Registration Service of the Quartermaster Office reburied Holley in a different site in the cemetery at Lambezellac, and on October 25, 1921, the GRS moved his remains to the American Cemetery in Oise-Aisne. He was buried on October 7 in the American Cemetery in Lambezellac, France, northwest of Brest. 3 Holley was one of the 53,000 American soldiers who died in France during the First World War. The troops debarked on October 1, just three days before Holley's death. 2 He had enlisted only two months earlier, on August 5, 1918, and had arrived in Brest just seven days before on the troop ship USS American. Holley died at the Naval Base Hospital #65 at or near Brest, France. ![]() Twelve years earlier, on October 4, 1918, Private Holley, Company B, 542d Engineers, United States Expeditionary Force, France, had died of pneumonia. Katherine Holley made the journey to France to visit the grave of her husband, Pvt. ![]() 1 Holley traveled to France as part of a Gold Star Mothers pilgrimage, a United States government program that paid the travel expenses to the grave sites for mothers and widows whose sons and husbands had died overseas as members of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during the war. She arrived by train at Les Invalides in Paris on August 26. At Martinsburg, she transferred to a train to New York, where she boarded the SS American Merchant for France. On the evening of August 14, 1930, Katherine Bell Holley, an African American schoolteacher from Hedgesville, West Virginia, boarded the train at the Baltimore and Ohio station at North Mountain, outside the small town. World War I Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimages, Part I
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