The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2022

46 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL we found and keep those interested involved. We cre- ated the CA History Project, a Facebook group for cur- rent and retired depart- ment employees to share information. And this has led to a number of follow- on projects, including recent efforts to help AFSA identify department person- nel who died while serving abroad whose names were not previously recorded on the AFSA Memorial Plaques (which I will refer to here as “the memorial”) in the C Street lobby. We are now attempting to identify the locations of gravesites of department employees who were buried abroad, coordinating with the field to document and photograph their locations and, when necessary and if possible, arranging for cleanup of these gravesites. We intend to work with both AFSA and the diplomacy museum to make these locations known and accessible to the Foreign Service community. We are also working on a video about two brave consular officers—Hiram Bingham IV and Myles Standish. While we were planning the exhibit, Consulate General Marseille and Embassy Paris informed us that they found a World War II–era register of passport services provided to U.S. citizens, a unique docu- ment related to the efforts of Bingham and Standish to issue visas to more than 2,500 Jewish refugees in France. Their actions were contrary to department policy at the time, and they saved thousands of lives in the process, personally extracting some individuals from a concentration camp and hiding them in their own homes before they could be smuggled to safety. Both officers eventually lost their jobs because of their efforts. The aim of the video is to share the story of courage of these two officers, as well as underlining the register’s importance to department and Holocaust scholarship. (For more on Bingham, see the June 2002 FSJ .) Rediscovering Forgotten Colleagues Between the 1790s and 1960s, the State Department tracked more than 6,500 consular and other diplomatic assignments on handwritten index cards. Now, we are in the planning stages of developing an online, publicly accessible database, including an indexed version of these consular cards, with links to photographs and infor- mation about the individu- als listed when available. The public will be allowed to contribute their own materials related to these employees to further flesh out biographical details. Of the many index cards, 807 cases of overseas deaths were recorded; we found most of them did not qualify to be added to the memorial. Either the indi- viduals had died of natural causes or diseases that could have been contracted within the United States, or they had died shortly after being medevaced back to the country. While researching the causes of death to determine whether they met AFSA’s criteria for inclusion, we uncovered stories of service that deserve to be told, even if the individuals are not listed on the memorial. Among those names we reviewed, we found a reference to the death of an early U.S. consul in Peru, J.B. Prevost, who prob- ably died of a combination of natural causes and exposure in November 1825 on the road between Arequipa and Cusco, his remains tossed out of a roadside shelter into the snow. He was later buried nearby by a concerned American sent to find him. Our research revealed that this consul was, in fact, John Bartow Prevost, the stepson of Aaron Burr and a member of what is now the Louisiana Supreme Court. While he has a grave marker in the family plot in Ridgefield, New Jersey, we aren’t entirely sure if Prevost’s remains were ever repatriated. We hope to find out through additional research. In 2007 another mystery presented itself. That year, FSO Paul Stronski discovered a gravesite in Hong Kong with a handwritten marker that read “F.R. Engdahl, U.S. Consul.” Engdahl’s name was not listed on the memorial, however, and when Stronski later mentioned this in his morning carpool, a colleague deter- mined to find out why. FSO Jason Vorderstrasse’s subsequent research revealed that Felix Russell “Russ” Engdahl, born in Spokane, Washington, to Swedish immigrants in 1907, died tragically in May 1942 as a prisoner of war in a Japanese POW camp. He had fallen down a flight of stairs. Engdahl’s name was recently added to the memorial, thanks to Vorderstrasse’s exten- This artifact is the 1937 marriage license of Vice Consul Felix Russell “Russ” Engdahl and Elizabeth Cary Lockhart. Research revealed that Russ Engdahl died tragically in May 1942 as a prisoner of war in a Japanese POW camp. His wife went on to become vice consul in Shanghai, returning to the city where they had met and married. His name was recently added to the AFSA Memorial Plaques in C Street lobby. ANCESTRY.COM