Jimmy Duncan Update

I am so ding dong excited. I have finally found Jimmy! I have written about him over the years and had small successes followed by major brickwalls. It has been years in the making, but I now know what happened to Jimmy and where he is buried.

I will begin with a recap.  I only had a few elements about this branch of my family when I started this adventure of finding James M. Duncan Jr. aka Jimmy. 

• I was told by my Granny (grandmother) she had a brother who died in Pearl Harbor.
• I knew my Granny’s given name, Katherine Elizabeth Duncan, aka Betty Kay, and her date of birth.  
• I knew my Nanny’s (great grandmother) married name, Viola Duncan, that she was an orphan who was adopted by Bertha Hoskins, and she had lived in California.  
• I knew my Granny’s sister’s name, Mary Lou Ducan, who she had married, and her children’s names and general ages. 

It wasn’t a lot of data to start my journey. When I started all of this Ancestry did not exist. Life was lots of writing to local historical societies and libraries and giving them as much information as I had and hoping someone would be intrigued and check their archives.

I thought my one great blessing in this search was that my Nanny’s first name was Viola, and her married surname was Duncan.  I was banking on the uniqueness of that name would allow me to find the family more easily.  

I first located the family in the 1920 census in Snow Creek, Nowata County, Oklahoma.  Jimmy had not yet been born, but there was Katherine E. (Granny) and Viola Duncan (Nanny) with her husband, James M. Duncan.  I now had my Granny’s parents’ names, the year they were likely born, and the state where they were born.  I had so much more data about my family.  

The family had moved over 100 miles south, but I found them in 1930 in Cleveland, Pawnee County, Oklahoma.  This time there were two additional children, listed as James M. and Mary L.   I was on a roll. I had the whole family and basic information about when they were roughly born.

This was a good time to stop and request the birth certificates of all the Duncan children.  When doing research, ‘close’ is not good enough.  You need to be accurate.  You need to get your documentation to support your claims.  Birth certificates often tell you not only the date and exactly where someone is born but also information about their parents and where the child is in birth order.  It lets you know if there are other children you might be missing. I was able to get all three birth certificates for the children of this family.

At this time the 1940 census was still not public.  I looked at other things that might be helpful in finding Jimmy.  Here are some of the sources I employed:

• City Directories where Viola and James lived,
• School records for the children, 
• Newspapers. 

What I discovered is this family moved a lot and James held all sorts of different jobs.  It apparently was hard on the family in that in 1936. Viola filed for divorce from James and it appears it was finalized in 1938.  

In 1937, I would find my last information on Jimmy when he appeared as a sophomore in a yearbook. His sister’s very large wedding write-up made no reference to the bride’s brother.  I also did a deep dive of research on Pearl Harbor and came up empty-handed.  The event was so thoroughly documented, that I concluded that the family legend that Jimmy died at Pearl Harbor could not be true. I also tried to find him in military records and could not find him there. I was stumped.  If you have read this blog before you know I had tried multiple times to request his military files without success.

Finally, the 1940 census was released 72 years after it was completed.   I immediately found Jimmy in the Army Air Corps in Hawaii.  Maybe the family legend was true about him being in Pearl Harbor, but maybe he had not died there. I now had things to work with and I was back requesting Jimmy’s Army records.  I had his regiment information and supplied this along with my request this time.  Once again I came up empty-handed.   I did not understand how this could be.   I knew that there was a fire in 1973 at the National Archives and many military records from this era were lost, but they had developed a fairly encompassing system using other records to recreate records of service. 

I continued my research, but I was starting to run into brick walls again with my research because of date limits to protect privacy.  Most access to information is somewhere between 50-100 years.   Lots of other things require a death certificate to release other information.  The stars were not aligned for me to get what I was seeking.  I hate mysteries that I can not solve. I had to put this one back on a back burner again since I felt I had exhausted my sources at this time.  

More time passed and the 1950 census was released to the public. Unfortunately, I did not find Jimmy anywhere.  I was once again stumped until one of the genealogy services started to digitize World War II draft cards.   I did not even bother looking at them since Jimmy was already in the service. It did not make sense to me that he would have filled out a draft card.  One day while working on his mother Viola the draft cards gave me a hit and the card was completed for James M. Duncan Jr.  I looked at this card even though I felt it was a waste of time.  Imagine my surprise when it was the Jimmy I was looking for and his next of kin was his mother Viola back in Oklahoma.  His birth date was right but his year was wrong, possibly because he used a different year when he enlisted as a young man.  He was in California and unemployed at the height of the war, it made no sense.   When I flipped this over there was a typewritten notation that he was discharged on 5 April 1944.  Behind the word discharge, there was in parentheses the word blue.  This meant nothing to me, but there is always Google to get you started anytime you are looking for something you have not seen before.  

What I found out is that the Army used what were called blue discharges to “get rid” of people of color, women, and homosexuals. They did not merit a dishonorable discharge because they had not done anything wrong, but the Army wanted them out of their organization.  They felt they were undesirable and did not deserve any VA benefits, so a blue discharge was like expunging their existence in the Army. No GI benefits for education, buying a home, or healthcare.  It would also haunt them in job seeking for the future.  Employers, bank loan officers and so many more knew that a blue discharge was a sign the government viewed you as undesirable.   Many blue-discharged homosexuals would never return home because their discharge outed them and in the 1940’s being gay was against the law in so many places and brought shame to families. 

Jimmy seems to have been one of those fellas who never went home again.  I started researching him using his new birth year and suddenly I was finding things on my great-uncle.  He stayed in California.  He started out in Inglewood and a little over a year later he was in Stockton, California.  It began when I found a tombstone in a cemetery in Manteca, California.   He was only 24 at the time of his death. He had served in the Army for five years.   I was concerned that with the burden of having served in the Army coupled with his blue discharge and the possibility he was likely gay, he may have committed suicide.   I started contacting the funeral home and the cemetery looking for information.   They were kind and shared what they had in their very old records, but there wasn’t much.  I found out that his death involved the coroner.  This was not what I had wanted to hear.  I turned to newspapers and I found newspaper articles about his accident and his death record.   He was working for a company that delivered ice.  He was in an accident, was thrown from his work truck and it rolled over him.  The funeral home published inquiries in the local paper looking for relatives but appears to have gotten no responses.  This was likely because his mother lived in Oklahoma at the time.    I am not sure who paid for him to be buried but because he has a headstone I assume it may have been his employer.

I am fairly certain that the family never knew what happened to Jimmy because when his sister died in 1959 her obituary states her brother survived her but gives no city.  This makes me think they did not know his whereabouts but they were of the belief he was out there someplace. 

Where am I now and where will I go??

I want to get the Medical Examiner/Coroner’s report on Jimmy to see what they knew about him, and where they got all the information they had.   

I want to pursue what it might take to change Jimmy’s discharge to a status that would allow him to be recognized as a veteran. I estimate Jimmy served his country in the Army for a total of five years.  I now suspect that he was there in Hawaii on December 7th and he served his country on that day that would ‘live in infamy’ and many more after that day.   I want his grave to have an American flag on it on Veteran’s Day and anytime that his cemetery puts out flags on the graves of veterans.   I think he deserves to be recognized for his service and sacrifice. 

I am nearly done with this story about James M Duncan Jr. He is no longer lost or without a family.  He belongs to the Duncan and Morris family who comes from a long line of service to this country and a big family.   He was one of our and I am proud to have him in our family.