I signed up with FamilySearch a few years ago. It's a website operated through the LDS Church that tracks genealogy, and because I signed up with them, I got an e-mail a few days ago about a relative that passed away at Pearl Harbor.
I thought it was a mistake. I didn't know of any relative that passed away that day.
Turns out, I was wrong.
I had no idea I was related to anyone who passed away eighty years ago today. On the page that gives me information about this person, there's a link to see how Byron Dalley Mason and I are related. The connection is, in a word, "distant." Bryon was my great-grandfather's sister's grandson. Still, I had no idea.
When I was a teenager, I visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. It's an amazingly somber and hallowed shrine to those fallen. I learned more of how that battleship suffered more than the others. If I remember correctly, the night before a musical group from the Arizona won a talent contest and part of their reward for winning was to sleep in. In reading of Byron, it was noted he was active in music and drama in high school. I wonder if he was part of the musicians that participated in the contest.
Of course, it's impossible to know if they had not been allowed to sleep in, would more of them survived. I suppose it really doesn't matter. What happened happened.
Since my father served in WWII I've always had respect and appreciation for those who went to war, not just WWII, but all wars. The horrific events of Pearl Harbor seemed distant to me, not personal. Even though Byron was not a close relative, it brought the events that happened on that day closer. It's been eighty years...such a shame Byron never got to come home and have a family of his own and create another line of distant relatives I would probably not know about.
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