Mystery solved??

Maybe.

I guess as much as I might be able to solve it at this time. Like I talked about in my Military Monday: Nathan Sadek post I found a WWI draft registration card for Nathan Sadek (?) of course this brought lots of questions about whether or not he was in WWI, how the heck is his last name ACTUALLY spelled, and many more. So I emailed my 3rd cousin 2x removed who actually knew Nathan when he was living to see if she could answer some of my questions and with what she told me I am confident that I have pieced together some actual information from this card.

I am 99.99% confident that it is in fact my 2x Great Grandfathers draft registration card. Lynda (the cousin) told me "..I can say that from all the old stories, this very religious man would have never served. His spoken English was not very good as his wife's English was also very broken. And I do not think that he could read English either. Grandma Leah never learned to read nor write in English either. Their lives revolved around Judaism and Yiddish was the language of choice..."

After a simple Google search about WWI draft registration cards I found this information "...Visitors to the U.S. and non-citizens were required to register, but were exempt from induction into the army. Virtually all the men required to register.." on RootsWeb. So Nathan definitely had to fill one out, but because at that time he was not a US citizen he was automatically exempt.

Because of what Lynda told me about Nathan's academics it leads me to believe that Nathan did not fill out the registration card himself. Maybe a friend of the family or one of the children did? Either way this could account for the last name being spelled wrong. Maybe he did not know how to spell it in English and gave the wrong spelling?

What really convenienced me that this was my 2x Great Grandfather's draft registration card was when Lynda told me this "..he owned a Dry-Cleaning shop and a tailoring Shop (all in one)..." on the draft registration card it lists Nathan's occupation as a tailor. Sealed the deal. Definitely his.


Very cool. I am off to search for some information about Nathan's Dry-Cleaning/Tailoring shop. Wish me luck, this should be an interesting search. Haha.



Nikki