Ancestry Magazine

His serious brown eyes followed mine no matter where I moved. I even hid behind the sofa, but when I came up he was still looking at me. This handsome man was my grandfather, Luis Cortez.

As a young old child I would gaze up at an oval black and white picture that hung on my grandmother’s bedroom wall. The photo was of a World War I soldier dressed in an Army uniform. He wore leggings and black shoes that rose to his knees. The boots stood out because his left leg crossed over his right knee. A black caliber handgun lay across his lap.

The man sat tall and straight in a high-backed wooden chair. His serious brown eyes followed mine no matter where I moved. I even hid behind the sofa, but when I came up he was still looking at me. This handsome man was my grandfather, Luis Cortez.

“Tell me about my grandfather,” I asked my grandmother many times.

My grandmother would reply, “He went to look for work, but no one knows where. He died i n Colorado.”

Over the years, I continued to ask her about my grandfather. One day my grandmother’s story finally changed. “He died in a mental institution somewhere close to Pueblo, Colorado,” she said. “God punished him for leaving us. He went crazy and died.”

When I was fifteen years old, I moved from Talpa, New Mexico, to Cheyenne, Wyoming. There were times when I thought of my grandfather; I talked to my mother, Asencion, about him. My mother had not seen her father since she was eight years old. She missed him very much. She told me of the many unsuccessful searches she had conducted to find her half-sister, Louisa, who lived somewhere in Colorado. My mother never located her sister. I found out through my research that Louisa had died at the age of twenty-five of a heart ailment.

In 1964, my husband, our two daughters, and I moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where my husband was to attend barber school. Perhaps it was the new move and the life change, but I suddenly felt an intense persistence to find out more about my grandfather. I wanted to fill a void in my life. I wanted to know who he was. Why was he such a mystery in our lives? What happened to him? Where did he go? Why did he leave his family?

I called the Pueblo State Hospital to inquire about Luis Cortez. Unfortunately, the attendant needed dates that I didn’t have.

I put the Cortez research aside and continued researching my other family histories for a few years. I felt like I had hit a brick wall and was not making any progress.

The summer of 1991 I attended a writing workshop at the local college and received an assignment to write a character monologue. I decided to write a letter to my grandmother from my grandfather based on a postcard I had retrieved from a family album.

The postcard I found was from my grandfather when he was stationed overseas in the Army. He addressed my grandmother as his dearest, loving wife and asked her about her health and the children’s well-be ing. On the other side of the postcard was a black and white photo of him dressed in his Army uniform. As far as I knew this was the only correspondence my grandmother had saved from him.

My letter read: “My Dear Wife Francisquita, I miss you and my two children. Army life is lonely and I am far away from home. I left you, my family, in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. I don’t know if I will ever see you again. After I completed my term in the army and came back I was too restless and jittery. I moved from New Mexico to Colorado. I met somebody else. You will probably hate me forever. I hope you and my children and grandchildren will forgive me someday and pray for me after I am gone from this earth.”

I signed his name, Luis Cortez.

The letter I wrote for the class further inspired me to find out more about my grandfather and my ancestry. I decided to search for my grandfather’s date of birth and death, but by that time my parents and grandmother had passed away. I asked my brothers and sisters but they didn’t know much more than I did.

One morning when I was looking at some family pictures, I found part of a small white envelope that had scribbling in my mother’s handwriting. It contained my grandfather’s name and the date of his death: 7 August 1936.

I telephoned my brother Victor in New Mexico and told him of my findings. He drove out to Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Taos, New Mexico, where many baptism and marriage documents are stored. My brother obtained a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate and sent it to me immediately. After I received it, I wrote to the Department of Health and Vital Statistics in Denver, Colorado. Within six weeks, I received a copy of my grandfather’s death certificate in the mail. It listed his name as Louis Cortez, not Luis. His birth date was one year and one day different from the birth certificate we had received from the church in Taos. Cause of death was listed as a heart attack at the Veterans Hospital in Fort Ly ons, Colorado. He died at the age of forty-seven. He listed “Anna” as his wife and next of kin. When I read his other wife’s name, I cried.

I drove to the State Archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and scrolled through rolls of handwritten and faded records on microfiche until my vision blurred. Finally I located the marriage date for Frances Gurule, my grandmother, and Luis Cortez: 27 April 1908.

Later, I studied my grandfather’s death certificate for additional details; it revealed that he was buried in Ordway, Colorado, a small community between Rocky Ford and Pueblo. My husband and I planned a trip to the area to search for his grave.

During Labor Day weekend 1992, my husband, our daughter Catherine, and I drove to Ordway. We arrived in the evening and asked a resident for directions to the cemetery.

It was located only one mile away on a hill overlooking the green cantaloupe fields, two miles east of Rocky Ford. The black wrought-iron sign swinging with the breeze read “Valley View Cemetery.” My stomach was knotted. We saw rows and rows of graves and were uncertain where to begin. We scanned a few monuments and I recalled that the United States Army provides white monuments for its soldiers so we searched the monuments and read the inscriptions. We all spread out in different sections of the cemetery. Within a few minutes, my husband yelled to me and motioned me over. When I got to him, he pointed to a white marble stone with an inscription that read:

PVT. Louis Cortez,
1 cl 115, Engineers 40 Division
New Mexico,
August 7, 1936

The following day we contacted St. Peter’s Catholic Rectory in Rocky Ford, where the church records were kept, but no one on the staff was available. I wrote a letter of inquiry and left it for the priest. A week later he answered that he had no records by the name of Louis Cortez.

Using the information I had copied from the monument, I wrote to the Veterans Hospital in Fort Lyons. The reply I rece ived stated: “All records were either purged or transferred to St. Louis, Missouri, where all the National Military Archive records are stored. You will need to fill out an SF 180 form required by the government and the archives.”

I obtained the forms and filled in my grandfather’s name, date of birth, his parents’ names, his date of death, and the information from the gravestone and mailed it to St. Louis.

While awaiting correspondence with the Military Personnel Records office in St. Louis, I also did research at the Laramie County Genealogy Library in Cheyenne. I came upon an address in Washington, D.C., to send inquiries regarding World War I veterans. Following my inquiry I received additional information about my grandfather’s infantry and division.

For the sixth time, I called the Veterans Hospital in Fort Lyons. I was still hoping for one more clue. While the receptionist patiently scrolled through the data on her computer, I asked her, “Could the Veterans Regional Office in Denver still have some of his records?”

She responded, “They might,” and then provided me with an address for the Regional Office in Denver, Colorado.

I wrote another inquiry and within a week I received a package from the Regional Office in Denver. It contained my grandfather’s entire document file—medical and dental record, military entry, and discharge date. The file filled in much of the details I had been seeking.

I learned that he had enlisted in the army at Pueblo, Colorado, on 27 August 1917, at age twenty-nine. He was listed as a laborer, a Catholic, and a married man. His health was excellent. He listed his emergency contact as his daughter, Sensonita Cortez, of Taos, New Mexico. Sensonita is my mother, Asencion.

The examining doctor at the Veterans Hospital reported that he had two gold crowns on his top and bottom teeth on the right side. He was sixty-four inches tall and weighed 140 pounds.

Grandfather served in the Army from 27 August 1917 until 9 July 1919, and was overseas during war time. He was honorably discharged at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after his unit demobilized.

In August 1919, one month after his discharge, my grandfather left New Mexico for Del Norte, Colorado, to secure work. He met twenty-four-year-old Anna Gallegos, and they moved from Del Norte to Pueblo, Colorado, then to Swink, Colorado, where he worked at the Nakamot Ranch. On 19 November 1921 a daughter, Louisa, was born to the couple at the ranch in Swink.

They lived in Swink for five years. In 1924 they moved to Denver, Colorado, and lived on Market Street. In 1927 they moved to Ordway, Colorado, where Grandfather worked at the Kuriyama’s Ranch Ordway and Manzanola. Their address was listed as Motor Route A, Crowley.

His last employer was with the W.P.A., and he listed his father, Ramon Cortez, as his boss.

The family resided in Crowley until my grandfather entered the Veterans Hospital in Fort Lyons on 26 May 1936. He was hospitalized for seventy-one days with general paralysis, cerebral-type. On 6 June 1936, Dr. F.A. Passarella M.D. performed an operation for spinal puncture under local anesthesia. Anna signed the permission waiver.

He died from cardiac arrest on 7 August 1936 at 5:07 a.m . Anna was still alive in November 1954, according to an affidavit to a representative in the Veterans Administration Regional Office in Denver, Colorado.

While her husband was in the hospital, Anna had corresponded weekly with Mr. C.R. Miller, the director at the Veterans Hospital in Fort Lyons, Colorado. In her letters she asked about her husband’s condition.

In completing the search for my grandfather, I came to know him as a real person. Sadly, he never made contact with the family he left behind. His only son, Daniel, also joined the Army in 1943 and was killed in action during World War II. His daughter, my mother, died before I could share this information with her. My grandmother Francisquita l ived to the age of ninety-four. She knew her husband had lived with someone else during the greater part of his life.

In my long search, I found answers to some of the questions I had asked so many times as a child. It gave me a sense of history. I can now answer my own children’s questions when they ask me about their great-grandfather.

Nellie E. Pacheco is the family genealogist and an author of family stories and poetry. She lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with her husband Tomas and their family.