It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in Genealogy finds. I’ll have to detail some of the other pieces her in a bit, but this one was fun.
We finally found out the details of Grandma Avis’s war service. If you have read some of my earlier blog posts you may remember that at Christmas Grandma all of a sudden come up with “during the war my sister and I made bombs for a while” and we were all shocked as no one had heard this before. At the time she couldn’t remember where they worked or any specific details. This last week we had a conversation with Grandma and her sister who remembered the location of where they worked. They were at the Nebraska Ordnance Facility in Mead, Nebraska. With that bit of information I was able to reach out to the Saunders County Historical Society and found that both ladies started on December 14, 1944 and left on April 7, 1945 to go back and help on the farm. They both worked as a Production Operator working on Boosters and started at 60 cents/hour.
According to the details we got over the weekend, Grandma was helping operate the fork trucks and her sister was actually involved in the booster assembly that was quite dangerous work. They couldn’t even wear metal bobby pins in their hair, wore special uniforms and one mistake could be really bad.
It was explained to me that the boosters were to enhance the explosive power of the bombs and make them more destructive. Wow.
I know I’ve mentioned in other posts about the North Platte Canteen where Grandma Maxine served a few times and that was just an extraordinary effort by several communities to recognize those traveling off to war.
Both of these are recoginzed by the Rosie the Riveter Association and for a small fee you can register yourself or a female ancestor who contributed in a varety of ways.
Cory and Nicole Family History 