Owens, who has spent more than two decades working at the records center, is a burly guy in his early fifties, wearing deliberately distressed jeans with zippers across the thighs. Mostly bald with a short graying beard, he is a trained Baptist minister, and his hearty laugh booms across the lab. Even in an office where everyone is enthusiastic about their work, Owens’ evangelizing sticks out. When he tells me about how it feels to help someone find their records, he scrunches up his eyes. “It gives me hope,” he says. “I just know that what we’re doing now is going to better the possibility of helping somebody. Somebody is going to look at a paper 500 years from now with my name on it and say, Keith Owens, whoever this was, did something amazing to help somebody back then.”
Until walking into Owens’ cubicle, I hadn’t planned on bringing up my quest for my grandfather’s records. But under the spell of his pastor’s affect, I babble out the backstory, my voice cracking slightly as I explain that I’d submitted everything I had and it still wasn’t enough. I don’t even know whether Grandfather ever received veterans’ benefits. Owens lights up. Let’s check the index cards and find out, he says. Before I know it, we’re at his computer opening a folder labeled “Egan–Eidson.”
We click into a few different PDFs before finding the cards that include the Eh- names. In the fourth one, we find the last name Ehman. We scroll past an Arnold, two Bruces, two Adams, two Alberts, two Andrews. Suddenly, we’re on to Ehmen, with a second “e” where the “a” should be. We scroll down further, until the alphabetization loops back to the start.
More Ehmans appear: Charles, Clement, David, Dennis, Earl, Elizabeth. “Come on,” Owens implores, as if willing his favorite sprinter to cross the finish line first. But now we’re back to Ehmen.
He sighs, keeps scrolling, keeps narrating. The tone of his voice has turned from excited to apprehensive. I can see the progress bar is almost to the bottom of the file, and my stomach drops. We’re not going to find him.
Then, just before we reach the end, I catch a glimpse of “Abraham,” Grandfather’s middle name. “Th- th- th-,” I stammer incomprehensibly, and loudly, fumbling to point him to the right card. Owens reads the name Fred aloud, confirming what I’ve already realized. “Holy shit,” I whisper quietly. “Oh my god.” It’s not like seeing a ghost, exactly, staring at this tiny card with a handful of basic facts about a person I adore and will never see again. It’s more like realizing the person I thought was a ghost is in fact quite visible.
But this is just the prelude to my real quest. Now, finally, we can find out whether Grandfather’s personnel record survived the fire. Armed with a service number, we head downstairs to the research room to look for Fred Abraham Ehman. I start to convince myself that I’m one of the lucky ones, that we’ll discover a usable B file with all that detail I’ve been craving, despite the 4-to-1 odds that it’s gone.