Final Resting Place for Des Plaines World War I Soldier Located in Connecticut

On June 30, 1999, the Des Plaines Journal published a story written by Karen Henrikson Kozenczak about the re-discovery of five small monuments bearing bronze plaques honoring the service of several Des Plaines veterans of World War I.  Lynne Mickel, who was then Curator at the History Center did a lot of research on those five soldiers, one of whom was Edmund Harold Lorenzen.  The last line of the paragraph that Karen subsequently wrote about Lorenzen has always haunted me – “…Edmund might possibly be buried in Hartford, Connecticut”.  I resolved that, some day, I would go to Hartford and attempt to discover (as Paul Harvey always said) “…the rest of the story.”  A few weeks ago, I did just that.

I knew that the Connecticut State Library was located next to the Capitol building, and that the Library had an excellent genealogy section, so that was my first stop.  Early on a Monday morning, I walked up the long stone steps to the front doors to the Library, where I was met by a state trooper who informed me that the Library is closed on Mondays.  Not a good start.

I further knew that Hartford is also home to the Connecticut Historical Society Museum and Library, which was my next stop.  Here I started to get lucky.  The receptionist was a delightful woman, who was captivated by my story.  She provided me with the names and locations of three cemeteries where Edmund might be buried, and suggested that I start my search at Cedar Hill Cemetery.  The receptionist in the cemetery office entered Edmund’s name into her computer and immediately found a record of his burial in Section 18, Lot 11.  She printed out a copy of the record (attached).  It shows that Edmund was born in Hartford to Edmund I. and Alice D. Lorenzen.  He was 19 years, 2 months and 24 days old when he died on December 21st, 1918 in Des Plaines.  Cause of death was listed as pneumonia and influenza.  (As you may know, a terrible influenza pandemic swept the world at that time, killing as many as twenty million people, 500,000 in the U.S. alone!)  The cemetery record also shows that Edmund was buried four days later on Christmas Day. 

I drove down to the gravesite.  It is dominated by a large granite memorial bearing the Lorenzen name.  At its base are five headstones:

Edmund Harold Lorenzen

PVT  S.A.T.C.

U. of C.

1899 – 1918

Edmund I. Lorenzen

1873 – 1940

Alice Gurley Dunham

Wife of Edmund I.

1875-1956

Olive Phelps Dunham

1871 – 1930

Carl Lorenzen

1848 - 1927

I took photos of the headstones (attached) and then went back up to the cemetery office to thank the receptionist for her help.  In the meantime, she had also located a newspaper obituary for one Anna Maria (Nissen) Lorenzen, widow of Immanuel Lorenzen.  She had been born in Germany and had died in Hartford in 1917 at age 62.  (Immanuel had died in 1916.)  Anna’s survivors included one “Edmund Lorenzen of Des Plaines, Illinois”.  (It would appear that this survivor was Edmund I. Lorenzen, Private Lorenzen’s father, and that Anna had been the soldier’s grandmother.)  As I pondered the lives and deaths of the members of the Lorenzen family buried here, I found it sad to think that Private Lorenzen’s mother had outlived her son by almost forty years!

Subsequent research on Private Lorenzen’s headstone reveals that “S.A.T.C.” stands for “Student Army

Training Corps”.  The Corps was a residential training program established in the Spring of 1918 by the Committee on Education and Special Training of the War Department on college campuses throughout the country.  It was intended to train upwards of 100,000 new officers by June 1919.  One such program was established on the campus of the University of Chicago, where Edmund Harold Lorenzen was a student in the School of Commerce and Administration.  Lorenzen was one of 1,007 young men who joined the program at the U. of C.  In his book, Judson’s War and Hutchin’s Peace, U. of C. Professor  John W. Boyer reports that officer candidates were housed in University dormitories and specially constructed barracks under the stands at Stagg Field.  The University’s Annual Register for the academic year ending June 30, 1919 reports that Edmund Lorenzen was a graduate of Maine Township High School.  A Public Health Report published in July 1919 states that in October, 1918, “influenza broke out in a group of the Student Army Training Corps at the University of Chicago”.

There are a few more leads than I plan to follow regarding Private Lorenzen, but I thought that you would like to know what I have learned thus far.