WW-1 dog tags found, RETURNED, news articles attached, scroll all the way down!

Thursday, JAN 15, 2009

Mystery solved: Clayton man receives
a family treasure

Joseph Barbour (left) holds his father’s World War I dog tags, which Bryan Bauman (back right) found in the mid-1990s and returned to him last week. Bauman’s son Wade also visited with Barbour. Photo by Rick Mercier
RICK MERCIER 14.JAN.09
For Joseph Barbour, Austin Pond used to be just a nice little fishing hole west of town.

Now it holds a special place in his family history.

Last week, Barbour received a phone call out of the blue from Bryan Bauman, a 45-year-old firefighter from Goldsboro whose hobby is metal detecting.

Bauman told Barbour he had his father’s World War I dog tags. Barbour was a little skeptical.

“I had no idea what he was doing,” said Barbour, 75, who was raised in Clayton on East Second Street and now lives on Hardee Street downtown.

Bauman explained he had discovered the tags after a flood in the mid-1990s – he thinks it was 1994 – caused Austin Pond’s dam to burst, resulting in partial drainage of the pond.

Bauman had thought the pond might yield some secrets, so he headed over to it with his metal detector when he heard about the dam’s failure.

He found the two tags near each other on the pond’s exposed bottom, and he knew they were World War I-era tags because he had seen his grandfather’s, which were from the same time period. But it took Bauman more than a decade to figure out whose identification they were.

He could make out “D. Barbour” on the tags, and the soldier’s service number also was legible, but that information was not enough for Bauman to solve the mystery.

“A couple years would go by, and I would get on a kick and try again,” he said.

Recently, he was examining the tags and noticed that one of them actually read “N. D. Barbour.”

“Oh, that might make all the difference in the world,” he thought.

It did.

Bauman posted a message on the Web site treasurenet.com asking if anyone could find any information on an N. D. Barbour, whose dog tags were found in Johnston County, near Wake County.

Two people responded with information about a Norwood D. Barbour from Johnston County who was sent to France in 1918, also served eight months on the U.S.-Mexico border, then was discharged from the military in 1919.

Bauman called the Johnston County Register of Deeds on Jan. 5, and a helpful employee searched and found Barbour’s death certificate. The record indicated that his wife was named Florence.

Another search revealed that the couple’s son Joseph signed Florence’s death certificate.

Bauman then searched for and discovered Joseph’s contact information.

Barbour was puzzled when Bauman first presented him with his father’s tags last week.

“I’m not familiar with that kind of a dog tag,” he said of the circular, aluminum means of identification.

Barbour said his father never discussed his wartime service. The elder Barbour went on to serve as deputy sheriff in Johnston County and, in his later years, operated a grill in the old Hudson’s Hardware building on U.S. 70 Business.

Barbour says he’ll never know for sure how his father’s dog tags wound up at the bottom of Austin Pond, which today in is ensconced in a subdivision.

“I have no earthly idea how they got in that pond,” he said. “All I know is my dad used to love to go over there fishing.

“That’s the only connection I know of that he would have had – other than when he was in the Sheriff’s Department, if he was chasing somebody.”

Here is the link: http://www.claytonnews-star.com/