Can You Help with a Mystery?

The holidays are upon us, and we were just going to wish all of you a fun week of celebrating and take off to attend our own family festivities, when our resident photo matchmaker, Shirley Waddell, sent us the following plea. What a great Christmas we might make for the family of a deceased soldier if we could find a relative and return the items that were donated some time ago to St. Louis Genealogical Society. Here are the details . . .

As regular readers know, StLGS sometimes receives donations that include original family documents. For the past several years, Shirley has tried to return as many items as possible to their families. Not long ago, she encountered a set of military papers from a veteran who is recently deceased, making her job a lot harder. However, she has been able to accumulate a lot of information on him, and we are hoping that you can help us get these papers back to his family.

Our Mystery Soldier, James Martin Ronald

James Martin Ronald was born on 4 December 1932 in Caledonia, Washington County, Missouri. His parents, James A. Ronald and Alta Ruth (Martin) Ronald are both buried in Caledonia. James Martin Ronald has a Find a Grave memorial with text that says he served in the Air Force during the Korean War, after which he attended and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. He was a teacher of popular science and a lover of nature and wildlife. He lived for thirty-nine years in Sugar Land, Texas, and died on 11 November 2019 in Houston. He is buried in Missouri, at Forest Hills Memorial Gardens in Scott County.

The documents in our possession are from James's time in the military. The first is a large photo from Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas, dated April 1953. Sixty-four men are pictured and identified, and James is the fourth man from the left on the top row. (We are showing just the top of this document due to its size.)

Two documents are from 1956. The first, which is a single page that might be a carbon copy, is dated 4 April 1956 and is a Request for Overseas Assignment Extension or New Overseas Tour. Shirley says, "It seems he received top secret clearance for this assignment to Japan and the Philippines." The second document is a seven-page long request for extension, dated 11 May 1956.

Here's where you come in . . .

At the time of his death in 2019, James was married to Paula (Ruffin) Ronald and had a son named John Jamison Ronald. James was a member of a Presbyterian church, presumably in Texas, where he was living at the time.

If any of this information rings a bell for you, or if you have the time to search or connections in Texas or in Washington County or Scott County, Missouri, can you help us reconnect these precious documents to James M. Ronald's family? It would be a great pleasure and a wonderful holiday gift to return these to them!

Thanks, everyone, and from all of us at St. Louis Genealogical Society—

Have a wonderful Christmas, Chanukah, and Kwanzaa!