Do you know who’s in the Cornwall Historical Society? If you don’t, you may be finding out soon. The members will be conspicuous at every major event. You’ll see them at the Memorial Day Parade, at RiverFest and at the Fourth of July Celebration. They’ll be selling plaques to be mounted on a Wall of Honor in their museum, and they’ll be collecting information for a database of Cornwall people who served in the military.
The plaques are six inches wide and two inches deep. They will contain three lines of copy:
-the name of the veteran or person on active duty
-the branch in which they served, and
-their years of service
People can pay for them with checks made out to the Cornwall Historical Society. The wall is being named for the late Andrew Maroney, a long-time member of the American Legion, who served in the Navy during World War II.
It’s not necessary to buy a plaque, however, to be included in the historians’ military data base. You just have to complete a form that the historians will be handing out at major events. If you miss them, you can pick up a form at the library or at the museum on the first floor of Town Hall. You can also download a form from the Cornwall Historical Society Facebook page.
The information from each form, along with current and past photos, will become a page in a massive binder that the public can peruse at the museum. The contents of the binder will also be included in a computer database.
The society is hoping to hear from local veterans who may have lived somewhere else at the time they served. The historians are also interested in people who are currently on active duty, and in veterans who lived here when they served but have since moved away.
Millie Boucher is one of the Society members involved in the project. “A lot of people don’t know that their neighbors have served,” she said when she visited the Local with Ellen Larkin. “I think it could be a good community connection.”