Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-07-27
True Stories From the Worlds Largest Record Office
Continued from Sirth Page

CONTINUED yTOTb OtLW Fuyc
stitute Brown for his true surname, decided
that william was toe common but Billings was
distinctive so Billings Brown" he became. Alas
there was such man in the files, but that
was William B." whose service correspondent
to that claimed by Billings. However the War
Department demanded that he furnish evidence
to prove that he was the man who served his
country as William b. Brown In reply Mr..
Brown composed a long letter In verse, which
read in part:
"The writer learns with deep regret, the
War Department files are yet,
This legal stuff is all myth, as asked
for in yours of the fifth,
That I will need court decree and
afidaVitS two three
With yards of tape and seals veTmillion
to discontinue of William.
Billings Brown is concise, a name that is
not listed twice,
The writer urges use of same and does
respectfully remain-Billings Brown"
Then there were the twins--Cecil and Cyril
who went 81 days without their first clothing
issue because the quartermaster could not de-
eide whether they were one or two men. Grad
ually their civilian clothes wore out and when
they got down to their b. v. DIS they were
bawled out, confined to quarters and called
the commissioning soldiers the sergeant
had ever seen. They kicked about by
mistake, transferred by mistake and finally
discharged by mistake After the the twins
went to college and the misery of errors con-
tinued. Cyril studied to be veterinarian and
Cecil wanted to be engineer, or was it just
the opposite: anyway, at the end of the third
year the credits were equally divided. Cyril
was a veterinarian engineer and Cecil was an
engineer Veterinarian.
Something had to be done and the dean of
the college did it. He called Cyril to his Of
flee opened an American history and wished
upon the "crumbest soldier" the first proper
name his eye fell upon, which happened to be
Benjamin Franklin Franklin was chosen and
added to his existing nomenclature. But to
this day there clerks in the War Depart
ment who are not quite sure whether Cyril
participated in great battle in the World War
while Cecil was on leave in Paris or was Cyril
on leave while Cecil fighting.
A MOTHER interesting file is the fingerprints,
which contains the prints of more than
100000 men and is the largest ingerprint file
in the world. 1t is used constantly by the Army
and as means of identifying former soldiers
In the year 1929 there were 1S,747 requests for
Identification received from various Federal
and State agencies; $500 OF these were shown
to have had Army service
These records prevent soldiers with undesir-
able records from re-entering the service Near
~ 5000 delinquents identified last year,
$50 of them were fraudulent enlstments be-
cause of concealed marTiages-the men that
'Iove them and leave them" These prints
also aid in establishing identity for worthy
claimants without expense TO them, the
case of the 100000 applications for the SOL
diers' bonus. In this vast f1ngerprnt file no
two prints have ever been found to be alike.
Not long ago a gTuesome package came to
the adjutant general II was 10 fingertips cut
from dead mans hands. man had been
murdered in Louisiana and his body mutilated
beyond recognition. The civil authorities were
not fngerprint experts, SO rather than send the
body to Washington they cut off the hngertips
and sent them instead. 1t is well that they
did for the man quickly identified as