It's an offspring of this great thread. I started a family tree not long ago. It is fascinating to dig through archives, piece together histories with the left-overs, and write little biographies for people that no one else cares about. You're a historian of regular people. Side note: I also started doing it for the street that I live on... finding out all the people that lived in these houses in the 20s and 30s. What they did, where they went, how they died, and who was left.Anyway, this thread is to share the random histories of people no one cares about. I hope you will share. Maybe these folks won't have a book or a distinguished place in the national archives, but they have a thread.-------------------------------------------I'll start with Charles Carly August, who is my great grandfather. This is really about a couple of friendships he formed during WWI (Vernon Wing in particular) but we'll start with a brief overview of his time leading up to it.Charles August was born in Norway in 1889, and moved to the states in 1895 with his father Carsten Julius and mother Junette Gustave. Here they all are right before the move:Carsten Julius died a few years later of appendicitis, and Junette, knowing limited English, had to learn right quick to care for the family and man the farm near Racine, Wisconsin.Around 1914 our man Charles went to Northwestern University.Then he transferred from this:and this:to this:...the mining program at U of Montana. Around that time he met Lyman Tommy Thompson, who would go on to serve with him in WWI. In 1917, after enlisting in the Army, Charles would also meet Vernon Packy Wing Packard. Carly served in France in a balloon company.Carly and Packy during wartime:The three formed a friendship that would last the rest of their lives. A few months ago I was digging around the family banks and found these letters, dated 1926, that Charles received from Vernon. By this time, Charles was back in Montana working at a ranch, while living in a shack with 3 children (one named Vernon Lyman) and a very vivacious and very schizophrenic wife with a secret love child raised by her sister. That year his house burned down as well. Meanwhile, Vernon was married with two children, working at a bank in New York; and Lyman was traveling the states being a wild man. I've read these letters 20 or 30 times. They're fun, and gossip-fueled, and in the end they leave room for speculation. (Maddening!) And they were the only letters aside from those sent from his sons during WW2 that Charles kept until his death. No one knew why until a couple of months ago. Well, for one thing, Packy sure knew how to write a letter...The first:The mysterious follow-up, I assume Carly returned:The final letter:After finding these, I began to wonder about the old triumvirate, and so did a little more digging. All I knew of Packy was that his name was Vernon and they called him Packy; that he was in WWI, and eventually worked at the Franklin Society in 1926. I knew Carly and Tommy were based on surnames, so Packy had to be as well. Eventually I found our man by making connections with draft records, the bank in New York, his age, etc. Vernon unexpectedly died of pneumonia just 5 months after writing the final letter. He was 31. We think this is why the letters and photos survived, despite losing everything else in multiple house fires. At his death, Packy had two sons. The youngest, born in 1926, died 5 years later; the eldest died at 22. Packy's wife outlived him by 40 years, outlived her children by 20 years and never remarried. As far as I know, this post is all that is left of our friend Vernon Wing Packard. Here's a photo of the last time all three were together:L-R: Tommy, Packy and CarlyCharles went back to mining in 1928. In 1930 his house burned down again, so he headed out to San Francisco -- where his mother Junette then lived, and worked for Herbert Hoover's family as a personal cook--hoping to find work where the new bridge was being built. However, when he got there, nothing was being built. So he took a job as a dishwasher, until his good friend Lyman Tommy Thompson found him and invited he and the family to live and work on his avocado and citrus ranch in San Diego. In 1931, Charles and family moved there, next to Tommy and family (was it the girl in the letters? I don't know); and they remained neighbors for the rest of his life, even after Carly bought his own citrus ranch. Charles August, Son of Norway:As for Vernon Lyman Thompson, the man named after Carly's two best friends, he had adventures worthy of his name... Joined the military in 1940, at 18, and survived six years in the US Marine Corps including being aboard the battleship USS West Virginia when it was sank in Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941 (including island hopping the Pacific from Midway, Guadalcanal and others).RIP Vernon, Charles, Lyman... and Vernon Lyman.