In 2009, while researching the World War One career of my grandfather, Stanley M Crocker of LeRoy, New York, I noticed some discrepancies among the Honor Roll lists of Genesee County war dead that had been published in area newspapers at the time of the war and afterward. Some of those discrepancies were understandable. It’s not surprising, for example, that a list of casualties published early in the war would have fewer names than one published later. Likewise, it’s hardly inconceivable that a name or two might have been overlooked or inadvertently dropped on any given list.

But I found puzzling differences even when I focused only on the four most complete Genesee County honor roll lists I could find, all published well after the war. Not only was the total number of individuals on each county list different, varying from 52 to 61, but the names on the lists varied as well. Some soldiers appeared on one or more lists but not on others. Surprisingly, when I compiled all the names from all the lists, allowing no duplicates, the total was considerably higher than that of any single list: 78!

How could there be such differences? Was it possible that no single list accurately reflected the true magnitude of Genesee County’s losses in The Great War?

It seemed only right and proper to set the record straight, so I set out to research and resolve the discrepancies and produce an updated and perhaps more accurate accounting of Genesee County’s World War I dead.

As I sorted through old newspaper articles and censuses in an initial effort to determine whether a given individual on a given list was indeed from Genesee County (it turned out that some were not, thus resolving several of the discrepancies), I soon learned that there were other contradictions among the lists. Hometowns, unit designations, dates and causes of death sometimes varied as well. To solve those mysteries, I turned to additional sources: unit histories, military records, postwar government reports, federal and state archives.

Sometimes those sources yielded information that resolved discrepancies; sometimes they simply produced additional puzzling contradictions. But they almost always did something else: they told me more about the person than just the bits of basic honor-roll information I’d originally sought. A census, examined to establish an individual’s hometown, might also list his or her occupation, parent and sibling names, a street address. A service summary used to confirm a soldier’s unit might also yield his enlistment date and place, other units he served with, the date he sailed overseas. A newspaper article announcing a soldier’s death might state not only when he died, but where he attended school or worked, his friends’ names, his burial place, hints of his personality. A unit history might include not only his name on a casualties list, but also insight into what he was doing, and where he was, in the days and moments before his death.

Almost without knowing it, I’d begun to gather together bits and pieces of information about each person’s life that, over the course of nearly a century, had become scattered by the winds of time—and that threatened to become only more scattered, perhaps lost altogether, in coming years. I decided to pull those scattered bits together, to preserve each soldier’s story as best I could.

So it was that my project became not just an updated honor roll list, but also a series of profiles of the individuals from Genesee County who died in service during World War I.

It’s my hope that the updated list and its accompanying profiles help to remind present and future generations of the sacrifices made by these individuals, and by so many others from Genesee County, soldiers and civilians alike, who responded with courage to the Great War’s challenging times.