Fritz-Fausnacht/Morrison-Winter Family Tree

The "U.S. World War II Navy Muster Rolls, 1938-1949" states:

Name: Earl LeRoy Morrison
Ship, Station or Activity: Arizona
Ship Number or Designation: BB-39
Service Number: 368 48 32
Rating at Date of Last Report: Sea1c (Seaman 1st Class)
Enlistment Date: 26 April 1940
Muster Date: 31 Dec 1941
Place of Enlistment: (blank)
Branch of Service: USN
Change of Status: Dead
Date of Occurrence (of Change of Status): December 7, 1941
Information: Killed in action against enemy 12/7/41. Identified by initials on cigarette case "ELM". Assigned death #543 by US Naval Hospital, Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. No other info. Next of kin not notified.

My mother and I were talking about Earl's grave marker and looking at the letter Gordon [Lee Morrison] had received about it. We think we know why the initials ELM are not on the grave marker, even though the letter stated they were.

The muster roll from a few weeks after the attack on the USS Arizona has him identified by the cigarette case with the letters ELM on it. The muster roll states him as body number 543.

The aforementioned letter from Vincent Vlach, a man who'd served on the Arizona, stated that Earl was buried in Halawa as body number 0543, H-X-051. In the book "Pearl Harbor Hosts: December 7th, 1941 -- The Day That Still Haunts the Nation", author Thurston Clarke wrote that the bodies were "in temporary cemetaries at Halawa and Nuuanu until 1949, when they were moved to Punchbowl." Vincent's letter states that when Earl's body was moved to the Punchbowl, it was to gravesite Q-1147. And that the letters ELM were (at some point) engraved on the gravestone.

The temporary grave's gravestones has the date of death and the name of the ship where the bodies were found. The Punchbowl gravestones did not. According to Clarke, a man named Ray Emory -- he was on the ship Honolulu at on the day of the attack at Pearl Harbor -- was angry that this information was not included. He spent weeks walking through the Punchbowl cemetery with a clipboard in hand, noting and photographing, and consulting burial records. During the 1990's, he successfully matched the grave markers of all 265 Pearl Harbor Unknowns (containing the remains of 653 USS Arizona soldiers) to the information from the temporary cemetaries.

Wikipedia states, "In August 2001, about 70 generic 'Unknown' markers for the graves of men known to have died during the attack on Pearl Harbor were replaced with markers that included USS Arizona after it was determined they perished on this vessel."

This would explain why the photograph of the gravestone does not have the letters ELM on it -- they were on the old gravestone. The letter Gordon received was dated 2000 -- before the gravestones were replaced.

Wikipedia continues: "In addition, new information that identified grave locations of 175 men whose graves were previously marked as "Unknown" resulted in the installation of new markers in October 2002." This means there is hope that Uncle Earl's marker can finally be replaced with one with his name on it.

Note by Christopher Dickson Fritz, 2012-01-13