Member Mike Allen shares a story on his father in-law, Gabriel Carino’s World War I experience.

The story actually began for Mike with a German war rifle stored in a closet in the house where his wife Pat grew up.  The rifle, brought back from the war by Pat’s father, always frightened her whenever she opened the closet door. Mr. Carino seldom spoke of the war, but Pat remembers stories of him first riding  “motorcycles to the front lines, but was shot at too much. So he changed to ambulance driving, and found they still shot at him.”

I’ve been researching Gabriel’s military career for ten years, and thanks to persistence, serendipity, and the marvels of digital data and the internet, I was able to piece this together.                   Mike Allen

Read Mike’s full story HERE.

The Research
Mike says he encountered a brick wall while doing World War I research – ” . . . all personnel records were destroyed in a fire. Over the years I kept plugging away, and thanks to some records and pictures kept by Pat’s sister I started to piece together his [Gabriel Carino’s] experience. And thanks to the digitalization of records by Fold3 I found a major breakthrough when they published the Connecticut Rosters for WWI veterans. That led me to the companies he was part of and some historical research rounded out my narrative.”
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Mike Allen became an SGS member this year and is currently on the Membership Committee.