Although I lived in Pennsylvania near my father’s side of the family for a year or two when I was in 6th grade and later in my beloved Washington D.C. area on two different occasions, I have generally considered the west my home with the majority of my life spent in Arizona, Utah, California and Colorado.
My mother however, grew up in New Hampshire, and told stories of ice skating on frozen ponds, spending her summers working at an ice cream shop, and visiting her grandparents where the train would rattle the house as it sped by on the tracks out back. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when she was 18, married at 19 and then traveled across the country so my dad could attend school at BYU in Provo, Utah where I was born. Up until my own solo cross country move I never fully realized what a drastic change that was for them and how they left friends and family behind.
As I pondered this history I started paying more attention and getting curious about my mom’s experiences and family connections back east. During one Sunday family Skype call Mom shared that my grandmother, Elizabeth Sargent Neibarger moved to Boston for 6 months to attend hairdresser school and had lived in the Franklin Square apartment building where her mother, Ethel Sargent, had lived years earlier while she attended the Fanny Farmer Cooking School in Boston. So I am not the first person in my family to attend school in Boston.
Shortly before I started my cross country trip, a family history guru introduced me to the Where Am I From? page under the Activities tab on the Family Search website. This page shows you where various family history events happened such as births, weddings, deaths, burials etc throughout the world. As I casually perused the world map for events I was very surprised to find that over 1100 family events had taken place near or in Boston. But the burial of Cedric Foster Coleman in the Philippines was an outlier that caught my attention. When I asked my mom for more information and she inquired, we were both surprised to learn that I am not even the first person to attend Harvard in my family.
I’m still piecing the story together but this is what I understand so far… My mom’s uncle Cedric attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Engineering and had also attended Annapolis Naval Academy where he was a Lieutenant. He became an officer on the USS Indianapolis which was commissioned to carry an atomic bomb to Japan during WWII. Their ship was bombed by the Japanese and sank leaving men stranded at sea where many, including my great uncle Cedric, lost their lives to injury, sharks and exhaustion. This is considered to be the US navy’s worse disaster and has been made into a movie…
I wanted to find out more about his life and experiences and wondered if Harvard might have his name on a memorial somewhere? After a google search I learned that there is a WWII Memorial in the Harvard Memorial Church in the middle of Harvard Yard.
Seeing his name engraved into the wall made it all the more real, tender and personal.
In the book The Tragic Fate of the U.S.S. Indianapolis – The U.S. Navy’s Worst Disaster at Sea by Raymond B. Lech the Appendix includes the following commendation:
It is respectfully requested that the Bronze Star Medal be awarded posthumously to Lieutenant Commander Cedric Foster Coleman for service as set forth in the following citation:
For heroic service in connection with operations against the enemy while attached to a United States heavy cruiser which was sunk___. As leader of a group of survivors, he worked unceasingly to keep them together despite the fact that the exertion on his part had such a weakening effect on him that it ultimately caused his death from complete exhaustion. On several occasions, he swam from the group to bring in stragglers, thereby saving their lives. His unselfish and heroic conduct throughout were outstanding and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to discover more about my extended family and their examples of service, devotion and scholarship. Recently the cousins on my mom’s side of the family have re-connected through email and I was delighted to be able to meet Mom’s cousin Ginger who lives in Cape Cod when I was vacationing there with my son Jacob. We had a delightful chat and I hope to learn even more about my extended family and things I never knew throughout the coming year.
