Great Uncle Carl Beightol

Even though he was missing since dying in a POW camp in 1942, my great uncle Carl does have a headstone in the Brookville Illinois Methodist Cemetery near his mother and father, Della McPherson Beightol and William Beightol.  Carl is on the memorial of the pacific in Manila in the Philippines. He has never been forgotten and although I was born 21 years after he died his memory has been there in pictures on the wall and in family stories and a sadness in my great grandmother who lived to be 98 and was very much a part of my childhood. I totally remember Grandma Della telling me she still stood out on the front porch and thought she saw him walking down the gravel driveway coming home. I think he should be returned to where she is but I don’t think I should get the final vote which ultimately I believe should go to the surviving children of his siblings, my mom and her cousins.

My Brother got a call, after all these years, Great Grandma Della’s prayers have been answered and the Army thinks it has located Grace and Clara’s brother Carl. He told them to call me with their offer of a funeral so a lady with the Army called me and is looking for DNA confirmation as the inmates of the POW camp had to be buried in large groups and some had their dog tags placed in their mouths but most didn’t. She wanted a female relative in direct female to female lineage to Carl's Mother, and a Male relative in direct male to male descent from his Father.

Once, while digging into old cartons of family pictures,  I posted a picture of Carl on facebook, I mentioned that my Great Grandma had told me she had been visited in the late forties by a soldier who had survived the Death march, and told her that the last time he saw Carl, he was too exhausted to keep walking and had slumped against a tree. He said he had seen a Japanese soldier coming up behind Carl, but then had to look away and keep trudging on. I had mistakenly taken that to mean that Carl was missing from during the actual march but I was wrong and My Mom's cousin, Donald Slack commented this "Carl came to Wyoming to be a cowboy but, after riding his horse into the Silver Dollar Bar in Cody, the Sheriff gave him the alternatives of going to jail or joining the army. He joined the army and died in the Bataan Death March in 1942... my middle name Carl is in his honor.

Dixie, actually, he survived the march but died of dysentery in the Cabanatuan POW camp not long after. We have a copy of a letter from his sergeant sent to "William Beightol" in 1974 saying that he had held Carl in in arms when he died, June 1942. Marion and I visited the site of the POW camp in 1972 and also saw Carl's name on the Memorial of the Pacific War in Manila."


So anyway, maybe Carl is finally coming home.  The idea brings tears to my eyes. I wish his parents could have seen this.  You'd think 76 years after his death that it would no longer matter, but when kids are separated from their family and answers fail to come it created a void that all the time between then and now has never filled.  There is a lesson there still valid today.