All the Nadolny family ever had was a photo – a portrait of Jerome Nadolny, an Army National Guardsman from Milwaukee killed in action during World War II.
Shaun Nadolny, 50, of Cudahy, grew up familiar with the image. Jerome was his father’s namesake, a tribute by Shaun’s grandfather and Jerome’s brother, Leo, after Jerome was killed in Normandy on Aug. 12, 1944. But the details of Jerome’s life were lost over time, and when Leo died in 1967 at age 44, the family’s connection to its past faded.
In 2001, Shaun, a self-described history buff, began digging into his family’s story. He started with Leo’s military file, which turned out to be filled with letters and records.
As Shaun pieced together Leo’s story, he realized how little he knew about Jerome. Aside from a date and a photo of a grave in France, there was almost nothing. “I wanted to reconnect that history to our family,” Shaun says.
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He requested Jerome’s military file, only to learn it had been destroyed in a fire decades earlier. Stuck at a dead end, he turned to an unlikely source: social media. Knowing Jerome served with the 109th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division, Shaun discovered a Facebook group dedicated to the unit and posted a message seeking help.
To his surprise, a Frenchman named Christophe Clement responded. Clement, who lived in a town liberated by the 28th, had studied the division’s history. Working together, they discovered Jerome was killed in the small town of Gathemo, about 40 miles south of Omaha Beach.
That breakthrough was only the beginning. “My great uncle was one of a million who served and one of hundreds of thousands who died, but France never forgot the soldiers who liberated them,” Shaun says. “They were considered family.”
To honor their sacrifice, Gathemo built a memorial and renamed a street after the division. This June, Shaun and two cousins traveled to France for the dedication ceremony, where they were welcomed by the mayor, a French chancellor, 75 war re-enactors, and a nearly 90-year-old World War II survivor. “He was 7 when Gathemo was liberated,” Shaun recalls. “I’m drinking wine with him, he’s telling stories and asking me for pictures. It was surreal.”
Shaun couldn’t fathom two decades ago that his journey would take him overseas, nor that he might find yet another lead.
While working with Clement, he learned that some U.S. servicemen had visited Jerome’s grave in the early 1990s. One soldier wrote about leaving flowers and never forgetting their buddy Jerome. The man who bought the flowers lived in Illinois – just minutes from where Shaun’s aunt, Leo’s daughter, lives today.
Shaun now hopes to track down that man’s relatives and learn even more about the uncle his family never truly knew. “We’ll see where this goes next,” he says.
