Birth Locations – Page 123 – The Exasperated Historian

163) Marina Yurlova

163) Marina Yurlova

Child Soldier who Became a Cossack at the Age of Fourteen During World War I

Born: 25 February 1901, Rayevskaya, Russia

Died: 1 April 1984, Bronx, New York, United States of America

She was injured twice during the war (and almost lost her leg to an amputation) and was released from service after suffering a complete mental breakdown following service in the White Army during the Russian Civil War.

Marina would form a Women’s Medical Battalion and fought on the Siberian Front during the war.

She was trained as a soldier by her father, who was a Cossack himself, instead of being raised to be a domestic housewife which was typical of the girls in her region at the time.

Marina was awarded the St. George Medal for bravery in combat by the Russian government.

She managed to emigrate to the United States and became a dancer in New York. Marina became a United States citizen in 1926.

She would publish three books about her wartime experiences.

You can witness her story in the docu-series “14 Diaries of the Great War.” I have linked the trailer for the eight-episode program in this article.

Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWyurlova.htm

https://www.girlmuseum.org/marina-yurlova/

http://thelifeofbinkleton.blogspot.com/2016/04/badass-women-of-history-marina-yurlova.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Yurlova

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/172165026/marina-maximilionovna-hyer

162) Private Sarah Edmonds Seelye

"I went to war with no other ambition than to nurse the sick and care for the wounded."

162) Sarah Edmonds

Union Soldier During the War Between the States

Born: December 1841, Magaguadavic, New Brunswick, Canada

Died: 5 September 1898, La Porte, Texas, United States of America

Also Known As: Franklin Thompson

Sarah had a rough childhood with her father resenting her because he wanted a boy. Sarah left home to escape her father and an arranged marriage—emigrating to the United States from her native Canada.

She moved to Connecticut and decided to pose as a man named Franklin Thompson to better hide from her father.

Sarah enlisted into Michigan’s 2nd Infantry in May of 1861. During the war she served as a hospital attendant, mail carrier, and possibly as a spy (though this has yet to be confirmed).

At the Battle of Williamsburg, she served as an actual fighter firing her gun but also as a stretcher bearer carrying wounded off the field.

She was wounded at the Second Battle of Manassas but managed to hang in there. In the spring of 1863, she contracted Malaria and deserted the army—fearing what would happen if she were discovered as female.

Sarah published a memoir of her experienced in 1864 and worked as a nurse (as her actual self-Sarah) for the rest of the war.

She married and had three children and in 1876 attended a reunion where her fellow soldiers greeted her warmly and agreed to help her get her desertion charge expunged and receive her military pension.

After an eight-year battle Congress approved her pension (making her the only woman to receive a veteran’s pension from the War Between the States) and expunged Franklin Thompson’s desertion charge.

In 1897 she was admitted into and became the only female member of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Sarah's story was featured on an episode of Monumental Mysteries entitled "St. Urho, Mystery Castle, Bat Bombs".

Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked

Located in my Personal Library:

Legends & Lies: The Civil War by Bill O'Reilly and David Fisher

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott

They Fought Like Demons by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M Cook

Uppity Women Speak Their Minds by Vicki León

Sources:

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/sarah-emma-edmonds

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6843300/sarah-emma-seelye

161) Lozen

161) Lozen

Chiricahua Apache Warrior and Medicine Woman who has Sometimes Been Called the Apache Joan of Arc

Born: c.1840, near present-day Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, United States of America

Died: c.1889, Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama, United States of America

Her brother was the warrior Victorio and she allied herself with Geronimo.

Lozen had an uncanny ability of knowing where the enemy would be when forming strategies an attack. It is said she prayed to the highest Deity her people had—Ussen—for guidance; linking her to Joan of Arc (kind of).

Between 1877 and 1880 she would lose around half of her people to skirmishes with the United States and Mexican Armies.

After Geronimo’s surrender Lozen and her people were shipped to Florida and then Alabama; where she died from tuberculosis.

Her name means “dexterous horse thief.”

There is only one confirmed picture of Lozen (partial of it displayed here) and it shows her and her friend Dahteste alongside Geronimo and other captured Apache warriors.

Badges Earned:

Located in My Personal Library:

Wild West Women: Fifty Lives That Shaped the Frontier edited by Erin H Turner

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, The Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy who Started the Longest War in American History by Paul Andrew Hutton

The Historical Atlas of Native Americans: 150 Maps That Chronicle the Fascinating and Tragic Story of North America's Indigenous Peoples by Dr. Ian Barnes

Levi's and Lace: Arizona Women Who Made History by Jan Cleere

More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Arizona Women by Wynne Brown

Sources:

https://mashable.com/2016/01/13/wtf-history-lozen/

http://crisostoapache.com/lozen-and-dahteste/

http://newmexicohistory.org/2015/07/21/the-story-of-lozen/

199) Józef Piłsudski

199) Józef Piłsudski

The First Leader of United Independent Poland (in 1918)

Born: 5 December 1867, Żułów, Poland, Russian Empire (Present Day Zalavas, Lithuania)

Died: 12 May 1935, Warsaw, Poland

He got his start by robbing a train carrying tax money.

Józef’s father was a nobleman, and his mother inspired him to hate the Russian regime.

In March of 1887, he was falsely arrested for the crime of plotting the assassination of Tsar Alexander III and was banished to Siberia for five years.

Returning in 1892, he quickly joined the Polish Socialist Party, and soon rose to be their leader. For a few years he edited a newspaper and married a divorcee.

In 1900, he was arrested once again, but Józef was able to feign insanity so well they transferred him to a psychiatric hospital, where he escaped the following year. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Józef went to Japan to enlist help in Poland sparking their own independence movement.

In 1908, he decided to fund a Polish Army, but had no money. So, he did what anyone in his position would do, and robbed a mail train carrying tax money. With the money, he was able to convert his secret organization into the legal Union of Rifleman, a school for Polish Officers.

In 1914, Józef rightly said that war was imminent. By 1916, Germany and Austria-Hungary declared Poland as free from Russia, in order to get Poland on their side against the Russians in the war. Józef agreed to put his men on the Eastern Front, after being named head of the Polish armed forces and seeing to it that his men would fight for the sovereign Polish state.

However, the Germans were not to keen on that idea, and in 1917, after Józef and his men refused to swear loyalty to the German government, he was arrested. However, when Germany collapsed at the end of World War I, Józef was able to return, and entered Warsaw a hero in November of 1918.

Four days later, he was named head of both the state and the armed forces. He attempted to spread Poland’s territory to what it had been before the Russians had taken over and was somewhat successful. After elections were held in 1922, he oversaw a peaceful transition of power over to his friend, the newly elected president. However, two days later, that friend was assassinated. When the next president came to power, Józef served as his chief of general staff.

He retired in 1923 after a right-wing government was elected. Józef, his wife, and their two children went to the countryside. However, by 1926, he decided Parliament wasn’t working properly, and led some regiments to march on Warsaw. The government resigned two days later. Józef was elected president in May but refused the title and saw it passed to another of his friends. He became the Minister of Defense instead. He held that position until he died and was a major behind the scenes influence.

By 1930, many of his old Socialist friends had abandoned him to a more Centre-left position, and decided they wanted him out of the government (they actually called him a dictator). Józef responded by throwing eighteen party leaders in prison. Though they were eventually released, Józef and his allies continued to run the country.

Though he began negotiations with Hitler on a nonaggression treaty between Germany and Poland, Józef passed away soon after from liver cancer, never knowing the horror that was about to befall his people.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Located in my Personal Library:

Strange History by the Bathroom Readers' Institute

Sources:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31542775/josef-pilsudski

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jozef-Pilsudski

198) Rodney Marks

198) Rodney Marks

The Only Person Ever Murdered at the South Pole

Born:13 March 1968, Australia

Died: 12 May 2000, Amundsen-Scott, South Pole Station, Antarctica

Rodney held a PhD in astrophysics and was sick for at least thirty-six hours before he died.

Because of the remoteness of Antarctica, his body could not be evacuated off the pole until many months later and was therefore kept in a freezer until that time. Eventually, his body was taken back to New Zealand for an autopsy.

Everyone had suspected the autopsy to reveal nothing out of the ordinary. The United States, which governs the station where Rodney died, released a statement saying he had died of natural causes.

Then the autopsy report came back. Rodney was killed by methanol poisoning.

Panic arose both at the station and in the US and Australia at this news. Rodney’s body had needle marks on his arms, but no illegal drugs in his system. Rodney had been a long abuser of alcohol, but the autopsy determined that did not have an impact on his death either.

The idea of suicide was raised, that investigators ruled this out after interviewing fellow scientists who were at the base with Rodney. He was panicked at the thought of becoming sick and was not acting in the way a suicidal person would have after falling ill.

Accidental ingestion was also shot down. Investigators posited that Rodney may have accidentally ingested methanol from distilling his own alcohol to feed his habit, but there was always a well-stocked bar available.

After searching the base, investigators discovered the only methanol there existed in a cleaning solution. And seeing as most of the people on the base—forty-nine in all, were scientists, the idea of someone accidentally putting the methanol in Rodney’s food or drink was also dropped.

He was murdered, and one of those forty-nine people remaining on the base had killed him.

You’d think this would be an open and shut case, easily solved. But the New Zealand government, who was investigating the murder, hit a wall.

Remember how I mentioned the base is owned by the United States government? The problem is, the base itself is owned by the US, but the land it sits on is claimed by both New Zealand and the United States.

When New Zealand investigators reached out to the people on the base, the forty-nine others, who all happened to be Americans, only thirteen consented to be interviewed. The US also declined to help the investigation in any way, stonewalling and denying New Zealand access to information on the American scientists.

The United States instead formed an investigation of their own. They did not share their findings with New Zealand, or anyone else. If they solved the murder, the person responsible was never charged. The murder remains unsolved.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/rodney-marks

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/142222490/rodney-marks

197) Richard Overton

At the Time of His Death He was the Oldest Known World War II Veteran From the United States

Born: 11 May 1906, Bastrop County, Texas, United States of America

Died: 27 December 2018, Austin, Texas, United States of America

He was also the oldest man in the United States.

Richard lived in Austin, Texas for so long they renamed the street he lived on after him.

A short documentary made about him in 2015 showed him still driving, smoking cigars, and drinking whiskey.

He reportedly told Steve Harvey the secret to his longevity was, “Keep living, don’t die.”

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/27/us/richard-overton-oldest-ww-ii-vet-died/index.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/195601808/richard-arvin-overton

196) Mark Hogancamp

196) Mark Hogancamp

The Real Man Behind the Steve Carrell Film Welcome to Marwen

Born: 1970, New York State, United States of America

Mark was attacked and left for dead outside a bar in New York and spent nine days in a coma.

He has no memory of his life before the attack and had to relearn all basic functions.

To create his own therapy, he made a 1:6 scaled World War II era town he dubbed “Marwencol.”

Numerous books, documentaries, and now the Hollywood film have been made about his life.

He was attacked after he told the five men in the bar, he enjoyed wearing nylon and heels at home.

Of the five, three went to prison and all were out less than ten years after the attack.

I included the trailer to the film in this article.

Sources:

http://marwencol.com/about

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/12/220042/welcome-to-marwen-true-story-real-mark-hogancamp-now

195) Charles Crittenton

Drug Manufacturer who Began Philanthropic Work After his Four-Year-Old Daughter Died From Scarlet Fever

Born: 20 February 1833, Henderson, New York, United States of America

Died: 16 November 1909, San Francisco, California, United States of America

Charles opened the Florence Night Mission in 1882 to rescue prostitutes and open homes to homeless and unfortunate girls and their infant children.

He became a prominent Evangelist upon his daughter’s death.

The National Florence Crittenton Mission received a federal charter in 1898.

Charles used his money from drug manufacturing to pay for the homes—seventy of which had opened by the time he died.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/crittenton-charles-nelson/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14339416/charles-nelson-crittenton

194) Second Lieutenant Eugene Bullard

The First African American Combat Pilot

Born: 9 October 1895, Columbus, Georgia, United States of America

Died: 12 October 1961, New York City, New York, United States of America

He was the first black man in general to become a combat pilot.

Eugene went on to become a hero in France before later working as an elevator operator in New York.

He joined the French Foreign Legion at the age of nineteen during World War I.

Eugene was eventually transferred to the regular French Army where he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

He earned his military pilot’s license in 1917.

Thirty-three years after his death the US Air Force appointed him Second Lieutenant.

Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/the-great-war-two-lives-eugene-bullard/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6157/eugene-jacques-bullard

A Fun Update (July 2021):

In late June/early July 2021, my mom and I took a road trip around some of the closer states to where we live. Along the way we stopped at the National World War II Aviation Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the following was on display there (this is a photo I snapped while in the museum).

193) Sylvan Goldman

193) Sylvan Goldman

Invented the Shopping Cart

Born: 15 November 1898, Ardmore, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, United States of America (Present-day Ardmore, Oklahoma, United States of America)

Died: 25 November 1984, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States of America

Sylvan and his brother grew up in their family’s dry goods store. After World War I, he found out about a new kind of store called a supermarket and was determined to bring the store to Oklahoma.

In April of 1920, Sylvan became president and his brother vice-president of the Sun Grocery Company, opening their first store in Tulsa. By the following year there were twenty-one Sun Grocery stores across the state.

They sold Sun Grocery in 1929, and in 1934 purchased the Humpty Dumpty Grocery chain, which wasn’t doing too good. Thanks to the brothers’ ingenuity, and Sylvan inventing the shopping cart in 1936, the chain was completely turned around.

After patenting the cart, he started the Folding Basket Carrier Company to manufacture his carts. He invented several other grocery shopping innovations, including the handy milk bottle rack.

He retired from the grocery business and spent the last years of his life as a philanthropist in his home state, and a real estate broker.

Sylvan passed away one week after his wife of fifty-three years died. They had two sons together.

Badges Earned:

Find a Grave Marked

Sources:

https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entryname=SYLVAN%20NATHAN%20GOLDMAN

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6789646/sylvan-nathan-goldman