San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
French family seeks help finding lost relative
I live in France, more precisely in Normandy. I am writing to you because I just read your article titled “Cemetery preserves history of San Antonio area ranching families,” published Dec. 21, 2019. I am searching for information about a Martinez family that owned a ranch near San Antonio.
I recently lost my grandmother, Marie-Paule Nabucet. When she was young, she worked at the NATO base in Orléans, France, as a secretary, until 1967. Before she died, she revealed to my mother, Sandra, that she was not the daughter of Marie-Paule’s husband, Louis. My grandmother met him in 1970, and my mother was born July 14, 1967. My mother told me that she had had many doubts (about her parentage) since she was a child, but she never dared to ask her family. Her real father — and my real grandfather — was an American soldier based in Orléans.
His name was Frank Martinez and he was from Texas, where his family owned a ranch and were well known. According to my grandmother, he was born during the 1940s or at the end of the ’30s. (She was born in 1942.) He had black hair and brown/black eyes. My grandmother thought they would marry, but he left France before my mother’s birth, and my grandmother never heard from him again. (My grandmother told my mother that Frank left a few days after she told him she was pregnant, but we don’t know exactly what happened. The base was about to be closed, so he would have left France anyway.) She thought he died during the Vietnam War. (We don’t know how she knew it; maybe a friend of Frank’s told her.)
Since I heard about this story, I feel like something is missing. I loved so much my grandfather Louis, but I have to know who was Frank Martinez and what happened to him. My mother wished she had met her father or at least saw a picture of him. (My mother’s stepsister has found a picture of my grandmother with a man who might be Frank.)
As I’m actually trying to have a child, I would like to be able to tell my future baby about my real grandfather. Your article gave me hope because it is about a family that could be the one my grandfather described. I tried to find contact information for the Juana Padilla and Jacob Zimmerle Cemetery Association (administered by members of a Martinez family), but it was in vain. Could you please help me?
Since we first corresponded, you have heard from Alfred Martinez, representing the PadillaZimmerle Cemetery Association, and learned that the Frank Martinez who served with the U.S. Army during the mid-1960s in France was not part of his family.
You’ve also heard from the National Archives and Records Administration, which keeps government documents including military service records. It found one Frank Martinez who is the right age (born in 1943), but the record it provided is sparse — only the year of death, 1971, is provided; “source of death,” residence and information about his beneficiary are blank.
Because it includes his Social Security number, I was able to find out a little more online. The first three digits indicate that it was issued in California; I found an Oct. 10, 1943, birth date and that he was a resident of California in 1965. There’s a little more about this Frank Martinez in his death file with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department’s Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem that makes it look as if he couldn’t be your grandfather.
He enlisted March 26, 1969 — too late to have met your mother at the NATO Base in Orléans, which closed in 1967 in accordance with the French withdrawal from the NATO Command Structure. He left the Army on Nov. 9, 1970, and died Sept. 10, 1971; so this Frank Martinez couldn’t have died serving in Vietnam.
Because “Frank Martinez” is a common name, I’m sharing your story with our readers. If anyone knows of a family member whose age and Army service fit this story, please let them know their French relatives would like to know them. To get in touch, contact this column.
STONES UNTURNED: Readers with an interest in the unidentified stone ruins — maybe the remains of a mill or the Confederate tannery — at the Headwaters at Incarnate Word nature preserve (discussed here May 17) wrote to share information they had come across, with further conjectures about their origins.
Gerald Mulvey, chair of the environmental science department at the University of the Incarnate Word, has been researching the legendary “Lost City of Avoca” and spotted a reference to the ruins in a 2017 report, “Archaeological Investigations of the Alamo Dam and Upper Labor Dam, Brackenridge Park, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas,” by Clinton M.M. McKenzie, published by the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Center for Archaeological Research. It quotes earlier studies of the site.
The “ruin” described sounds like the one still extant off St. Brigid’s Path — “the remains of a foundation situated across a now-intermittent stream which is a tributary of the San Antonio River … interpreted as a mill, as a guardhouse or possibly as part of the CSA Tannery complex.” The recent study says that “archival research (including Bexar County deed records and a newspaper advertisement) … suggests the site is Alsbury’s Mill, constructed by Hanson Alsbury and Francois Marchant in 1853.” Mulvey suggests that “it is very possible that this site was used for several purposes during this period, as the social, economic and political conditions evolved.”
Environmental scientist Gregg Eckhardt, curator of the Edwards Aquifer website, edwardsaquifer.net, shared that one of the earlier studies quoted by McKenzie was “The Archaeology and Early History of the Head of the San Antonio River,” by Karen E. Stothert. This 1989 report on the part of the Olmos Basin that contains the Blue Hole at Incarnate Word, thought to be the origin spring of the San Antonio River, includes some additional discussion and theories about the stone structure.
One is that it could have been built in the early 20th century to be occupied by “a watchmen employed by the Sisters of Charity (of the Incarnate Word) to prevent trespass from adjacent Brackenridge Park.” Stothert casts some doubt on the Confederate tannery theory, since the ruins are far from the tannery’s probable site near the San Antonio Zoo, and notes that while the structure may have been built by the Alsbury family, there isn’t enough evidence to indicate that it was a mill. The so-called “Old Mill Site,” she concludes, “illustrates how the interpretation of old buildings can be a problem.”