#52 Ancestors Week 8 - Good Deeds - IDA MARIE LICHTSINN

Amy Johnson Crow at No Story Too Small has a weekly challenge to write the stories of your ancestors. This is week #8 and the suggested theme is GOOD DEEDS.  I have chosen to write about Ida Lichtsinn, my first cousin twice removed.  She had been in my database for a long time but I didn't have much more than birth and death dates.  Then I was doing a search in newspapers.com for my grandfathers surname - Moehlmann - and I found the following article.

Ida's sister Emma is giving her a farewell party.  Ida is taking off to San Francisco to get married. That really caught my attention.  She's not getting married in her hometown where all her brothers and sisters were married? I had to do a little more research.  How had she become engaged to someone living in San Francisco so far from Indnianapolis?

Next article I found was from the Fort Wayne Sentinel from 10 years prior to the farewell party.  In 1918 she was awaiting her transfer to Europe as an Army nurse.

  Among the Fort Wayne girls who are serving as army nurses is Miss Ida Lichtsinn, who is now in New York anxiously waiting to go across in the interest of humanity and of the United States. Extracts from a letter received by one of her friends in the city follow
   "I am now in New York City and will sail for France in three or four weeks.  We arrived here August 25. There were twenty-nine of us in the party.
   My address now is Arlington Hotel, 25th St., New York City, Emergency Unit, Group E. I am feeling fine and no doubt will until I get across."
  Miss Lichtsinn has two brothers in the service. One is in camp in the United States and the other is in France.

I tried to find out about the Emergency Unit, Group E and found a short biography on Bertha Greeman, most likely one of Ida's fellow nurses, in the book Ripley County's Part in the World War which said:

"She was assigned to Base Hospital, Camp Lewis, American Lakes, Washington, for army training and served there until August 20, 1918. On this last date she was sent to the nurses' mobilization station at New York City to prepare for overseas work.

Her unit, Emergency Unit, Group E, left Hoboken on the British ship Melita on the eighth of September, reaching Liverpool, England on September 21st.  They proceeded to Le Harve, France on the 23d and were assigned to Evacuation Hospital 11 at Brizeaux-Forestierre in the Argonne for immediate service at the front."

The Evacuation Hospital 11 was used by the 1st Division for troops that had been gassed.  When the war broke out there were about 400 active duty nurses. By the end of the war 10,000 nurses had served overseas and in fact the nurses were sent before the troops to set up hospitals. 

I found a Journal of Nursing that verified Ida has been sent to Camp Lewis prior to her deployment overseas. As it turns out, this is where she met her future husband.  He was a part of the 91st Infantry stationed there.  I don't know how they met but there was a large flu outbreak and one whole barrack was set up to treat the soldiers.  Perhaps Ida met him there. I discovered where they met when I found a quote by her son, Harvey L. Morris, Jr.

When Harvey L. Morris of La Palma, California, opened the February/March issue [American Heritage Magazine 1981], he was astonished to find himself looking at his mother. She is the Red Cross nurse on page 87, bathing the eyes of a gassed soldier.

“Her name was then Ida Marie Lichtsinn of Indianapolis, Indiana. She took nurse’s training at Fort Wayne Lutheran Hospital, graduating in the class of 1912.

“She enlisted as a nurse at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. Before going overseas she was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington, where she met my father, a patient of hers and a private in the 91st Division. (Years later they met again, and one thing led to another, et cetera, and they were married in 1928.)

“The years 1917-18 found her serving in France and Belgium. Toward the end of the war she was wounded in action during a shelling, suffering a severe leg injury for which she received veterans compensation until her death in 1975. Many times during the Depression, it was all we had to go on.

“Incidentally, she never received the Purple Heart, as technically nurses were not in the armed forces. How about that for an injustice?”

I think being a nurse is certainly a good deed. To be a nurse in a war zone is really going the extra mile. I'm so glad I learned more about Ida. She did return to Indianapolis after the war and was living with her parents and enumerated there in the 1920 census.  She was still practicing nursing up until her move to San Francisco.