What's cool about the newspaper

Connections.

The institution of a newspaper or as we now say "news enterprise" has always had that connection with its audience, its readers.

People from Johannes Gutenberg to Bill Gates have made the connections faster and more convenient, but the old fashioned gathering of news and spreading it to people who think it's relevant is a craft that will always be around.

Take the story Free Press reporter Mark Fischenich did a few weeks back on people in the Mankato area finding where their uncle was buried after being killed in the Normandy invasion during World War II.

It was an amazing story of people finding their past through the power of the Internet. It was a story of history and how average people in Europe still remember the day the Americans freed them from tyranny of the Nazis.

They not only remember, they act. They now tend the graves of those U.S. soldiers.

That family we profiled took calls from others who read the story, wanting to know how they might find their own relatives who died in Europe in World War II.

I was one of those who was curious as well. I never knew my uncle John E. Spear, my Dad's brother. But we knew he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, Dec, 29, 1944.

The Bulge was one of the most brutal and horrific battles of World War II. My father's side of the family, including my father, have been dead 15-20 years, before I had a real interest in finding out more about my uncle.

Luckily, my older sister had heard he was buried in a cemetery in Luxembourg, but didn't know where. She remembered my other uncle going to visit his grave.

We didn't know if he was the one of thousands of U.S. soldiers killed in that battle that couldn't be identified.

The story on the local family got me to searching on the Internet. Sure enough, the American Battle Monuments Memorial organization tends and operates numerous U.S. military cemeteries in Europe. I looked up Luxembourg's American military cemetery and found a searchable database of all who were buried there.

I searched by state. Minnesota had a handful of soldiers killed. Halfway down, was the name John E. Spear, his rank, date of death, and the location of his grave. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

My goal will be to visit that grave some day, to have a connection, and maybe write another story so someone else can find their connections as well.