Volunteers work to preserve legacies of Indiana’s veterans

Upstairs in the McGrady-Brockman building of the Knox County Public Library, staff member Anne Hecht pulls a couple of aged 8x10 portraits of two young boys from one of many storage totes strung across the floor.

“Here are their baby pictures — this is Joseph and this is Francis,” she says, gesturing with her head.

“Both went off to war, and one survived and one did not,” Hecht noted of the northern Indiana brothers.

As she sifts through the stacks that comprise the Joseph and Francis Halal family archives, Hecht holds up beautifully ornate baptismal records, postcards, and albums filled with generations of photographs, many long predating WWII.

“This is every card, every Valentine, everything this family got in the mail,” she said, carefully sifting through the overflowing totes.

When not doing archival work at the library, Hecht also volunteers at the Indiana Military Museum and says it’s becoming more common for families of deceased World War II veterans to bring in entire collections of personal archives to donate.

“They either want to share them, or they just don’t know what to do with them,” she said.

Military museum founder and curator, Jim Osborne, says for every family of descendants deeply attached to their ancestral archives and memorabilia, “there are probably a dozen who don’t really care.”

And, he says, while “that’s okay,” he’s grateful for the Hoosier families who look for ways to preserve the legacies of those who fought for their country.

More than 450,000 Hoosier men and women served in the military in some capacity during World War II, but fewer than 1% of those amongst the Greatest Generation still remain to share their stories.

As more of these veterans are lost to time and age, so, too, are the stories and legacies of many. These scrapbooks full of wartime love letters, brief but comforting telegrams, and lifelike photographs are now increasingly destined for the rubbish bin when left behind for the next generation.

Osborne says that volunteers at IMM and the staff at KCPL — people like Hecht — are doing what they can to preserve some of the individual stories of these men

and women, putting the faces and names to some of those who served during the allied campaign.

Some of those stories — once smiling faces in the photographs — met tragic ends amid service to their country during WWII; more than 13,000 of those killed were from Indiana.

Such was the case for the Halal family.

Pvt. Joseph Halal in Feb. 1943 was killed in action in Tunisia, not long after sending a Western Union telegram home to his mother, Elizabeth, saying “all is well.”

“There’s the one that says ‘killed in action,’ “Hecht says mournfully before pointing to a black-andwhite photograph of Halal’s mother standing next to his flag-draped casket.

For Hecht, the mission to preserve the archives of Hoosier veterans long since gone is somewhat personal, recalling the stories and artifacts of her uncle, William Randall Crecelius, who, too, was killed in the war.

She says one of her grandfather’s greatest fears was that his son, killed when his airplane — the Hoosier Traveler — exploded in the Pacific theater, would be forgotten.

“So my grandfather started a scholarship at Oakland City University so that his name would be carried on,” Hecht said.

For her, it’s difficult to imagine a family not wanting to cling to each photograph and letter produced by

their heroic parents or grandparents.

“Just look at this,” she says of the collection of Halal archives. “It’s such a wonderful family history — it’s all here,” she adds, leafing through telegrams and death notices.

“And this family is a great example of Eastern European immigrants who immigrated to Indiana

and later served,” she said of the brothers who were the children to Hungarian parents.

Of the thousands of individual documents, photos, insignia and medals from across the state — including Joseph Halal’s Purple Heart — Osborne says he and Hecht have plans to digitally archive those artifacts so they can be made accessible online.

“But that will take mucho hours of work,” he says with a laugh before adding that all of the materials, for now, are safely housed in the museum’s large walk-in, climate-controlled vault.