FOR AND WITH OTHERS
“It’s Not Just About Connection Through History, It’s About Service And Trying to Help Others” How Paul Brueggemann ’84 used his genealogy skills to honor local veterans — and made a poignant discovery close to home. BY MEREDITH FIDROCKI
A
s a longtime genealogy enthusiast, Paul Brueggemann ’84 is always looking for his next research project. Last spring, long days at home amidst the pandemic inspired him to tackle something he’d been thinking about for years. He and his wife, Janine, hopped in their car and went on a winding hunt around Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, where he lives and grew up. The pair was on a mission: Locate and compile a list of every town veterans square, named in honor of veterans or volunteers with
Shrewsbury ties. “We found 21 of them on the first shot,” shares Brueggemann, who says distinctive bronze name plaques made the squares easy to spot. After some local outreach, he obtained a full list revealing 10 squares he’d missed on their ride. As a way to honor these 31 veterans, Brueggemann set out to research and document details of their lives — giving himself a deadline of Veterans Day 2020 to share his findings with the community. He says a similar project completed in neighboring Worcester inspired the idea. Brueggemann, who has worked in insurance for 37 years, first took a genealogy course in the late 1980s while
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trying to help his family fill in gaps about his grandfather’s naval service in World War II. He has been indulging his love of history and solving “mysteries,” as he calls his projects, ever since. “Once I started, I was pretty hooked,” he says. “Even though I was a math major, I always gravitated to taking history classes at Holy Cross.” Collaborating with local historians and veterans groups, Brueggemann scoured census and military records, obituaries, cemeteries, old newspaper articles and high school yearbooks to piece together the 31 veterans’ stories. He discovered that they served across six conflicts, from the Revolutionary War to the war in Afghanistan. With each backstory, Brueggemann says the squares he’d passed by for decades took on deeper meaning. One name in particular — Cpl. Lloyd E. Hill, USMC — piqued his curiosity. Wondering if the corporal was related to his longtime next-door neighbor Marion (Hill) Kniskern, who passed away in 2014, Brueggemann emailed
