John Green of the Theodoric Bland, Thomas Nelson, and Lord Delaware
Posted by J.P. Green on January 23, 2015, 1:33 pm
I am curious if any shipmates of my grandfather, John Paul Green (or perhaps Johnny to some of you) of Ashland, KY are still with us and, if so, if they recall any memories of their service with him. I was a lad of 12 when he died, so I never got to ask him about his time in the Navy. He seems to have served on the Theodoric Bland, the Thomas Nelson, and the Lord Delaware.
As you can imagine, most of the World War II Armed Guard veterans are no longer with us. For those few that are, the chances that one of them was your grandfather’s shipmate and happened to read your message on this message board are exceedingly slim. Then again, one never knows.
I have no information about your grandfather except that I did find a crew list for SS THOMAS NELSON on a voyage from Baltimore to Newcastle-on-Tyne and Middlesbrough, England, on the east coast of England, and return to New York in the period January – May 1943. The Armed Guard crew included a John Green, age 31 (therefore born about 1912) from Kentucky. That seems to match the information about your grandfather at the Navy Memorial site. I was unable to find crew lists for THEODORIC BLAND or LORD DELAWARE.
Anyway, below are John Green’s Armed Guard shipmates from the voyage in THOMAS NELSON. After each name is the man’s age as of the time of the voyage and his home state. As you can see there’s not much to go on. You may wish to run each name (or at least the more uncommon names) in a search at the Social Security Death Index (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3693) to identify those who have died. Then search for any remaining names at an online telephone directory like whitepages.com, or just do a Google search on the name. Searching for the more common names would probably not be profitable. But you just might turn up a long-ago shipmate whom you can try to contact.
Good luck.
Ron Carlson, Webmaster Armed Guard / Merchant Marine website www.armed-guard.com
Frederick Adams 19 West Virginia Roy Buick 23 California William Call 21 Ohio Ernest Chiocca 21 Massachusetts Sammy Clements 18 Georgia Don Cooperstein 19 Massachusetts Monroe Derrick 18 South Carolina Paul Dick 26 Pennsylvania Walter Dobek 21 New York Edward Domijan 20 Massachusetts Harold Donahue 22 Georgia Walter Dudek 23 Ohio George Esco 20 Georgia Seth Eubanks 18 North Carolina Robert Fly 21 North Carolina Florene Giesler 18 Illinois John Green 31 Kentucky Ralph Hall 20 Kentucky Seth Harkleroad 21 Texas Jim Harnisch 29 Massachusetts Roy Keith 18 New York Stephen Kelley 18 New Jersey Raymond Kintzel 17 New Jersey Charles Lynto 22 West Virginia Jim Middleton 21 England Wilfred Pevin 20 Rhode Island Otie Phillips 32 Tennessee
Re: John Green of the Theodoric Bland, Thomas Nelson, and Lord Delaware
Ron: THANK YOU for finding and posting this info. Yeah, I suspect most, perhaps all, of the crew have by now "put to sea." But even after procrastinating I thought it couldn't hurt to try. This crew list alone is far more than I had. My best shot was that the descendent of a crew member might see the post, but I will certainly try the experiment/search you suggest! (The fact that such things are online is simultaneously handy and yet a bit creepy.)