My great-grandfather’s Purple Heart was missing for decades, and the story of how it finally made its way back to our family is pretty incredible. My great-grandfather, Garland Filmore Grubbs, served in the Army during WWII and the Korean War. He received several military decorations, including a Purple Heart, Air Medal, Good Conduct Medal, and Korean Service Medal with three Bronze Service Stars.
Unfortunately, a lot of his military records were destroyed in the 1972 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, so there’s still quite a bit about his service that we don’t know.
Here’s where things get interesting.
Back in 2003, a woman named Debbie Hoffman found his Purple Heart in the attic of her home in Colonial Heights, Virginia. She and her husband had purchased the house from the Farley family, but nobody knew how the medal ended up there. Debbie gave it to her niece, Kate Neuman, who passed it along to her friend Angela Andrew. Angela was an Army personnel officer, and Kate figured she’d have a better chance of finding the family it belonged to.
What Angela didn’t know was that she’d spend the next 20 years trying to solve this mystery.
She contacted Army Human Resources Command, searched through military records, and eventually found some information about my great-grandfather on Ancestry. Unfortunately, she kept hitting dead ends, especially because so many of his records had been destroyed. Meanwhile, this Purple Heart was traveling all over the place with her. Germany, Mississippi, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Virginia. She kept it on her desk, and apparently, people would ask about it all the time. Even after retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, she still held onto it.
Then, right before Veterans Day, someone brought up the medal again. Angela decided to give the search another try and somehow came across our family tree on Ancestry. After roughly 20 years, she’d finally found us.
She wrote a letter explaining everything, including how excited she was to tell all the people who had asked about the medal over the years that she’d finally solved the mystery.
I can’t get over the fact that someone held onto my great-grandfather’s Purple Heart for that long and never gave up on finding his family. She had absolutely no obligation to spend years researching a stranger, especially after finding out most of his military records were gone.
And I’m still curious how his medal ended up in some random attic in Virginia in the first place. That’s one mystery we may never solve. But now his Purple Heart is back with our family, along with a letter explaining its 20-year journey and some of his surviving military records.
It’s crazy to think about how many places this medal traveled and how many people played a part in getting it home. All because one woman found it in an attic and another refused to give up on finding its owner.
I wonder how many other missing medals are sitting in attics or boxes somewhere, just waiting to find their way back to someone’s family.
