This work is funded in part by the IEHS Digital History Seed Grant.
Between 1917 and 1923, thousands of American soldiers married while serving overseas in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) and American Forces in Germany (AFG). Those foreign war brides constituted a discrete group of female migrants who immigrated to the United States during the overlapping periods of military demobilization and increasingly restrictive federal immigration laws. At a time when the U.S. Congress worked to legislate national quotas and racial exclusion to keep migrants out, the U.S. military took on the mantle of a quasi-immigration enforcement agency by investigating and approving or disapproving of prospective war brides. The “war bride” moniker, a label and sometimes identity, transcended nationality, age, religion, class, race, and parental status.
It is well known that the majority of America’s foreign war brides were French. Thousands more came from the United Kingdom. However, hundreds came from Germany, and still many others came from Russia. In fact, war brides came from places as disparate as Luxembourg, France, Wales, England, Scotland, Italy, British Honduras, Germany, the United States, Turkey, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Algeria, Romania, Poland, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Argentina, and more. Their husbands were born in as many, if not more, countries. The war bride framework enables me to examine a wide range of women who encountered the state in particular ways. When I began research for my dissertation, tentatively titled, “Here Come the Brides, West from the Fight: The American Immigration of First World War Foreign War Brides,” I wanted to begin with a clearer demographic picture of the women and children who emigrated through marriage to American soldiers.
With notable exceptions, historians have devoted few scholarly works to examinations of America’s First World War foreign war brides. This is particularly true when comparing the brides to their later twentieth-century successors who dwarfed them in number. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger, analyzed a sample of war bride visa applications from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).[1] I sought to build on this important work and create a more complete picture of war bride demographics by using digital methods to create a data set of the entire collection of visa applications. This collection does not include all the war brides. For example, it did not include women who married soldiers in the AFG; however, it is a rich starting point.
At first, I thought I would transcribe them myself one by one onto a spreadsheet. Years later, I found myself frustrated with an incomplete data set and many unanswered questions. With the help of the IEHS Digital Seed Grant, and just as importantly, the counsel of the IEHS Digital Projects Committee, I have expedited the process by using AI tools. After trial and error with a few methods, I used my grant funds for a subscription to HandwritingOCR to upload eight volumes of PDFs of the brides’ visa applications. The documents are formulaic, and the forms are typed; however, embassies and consulates in the U.K. and France, where most of the documents in this collection were issued, used different forms. Additionally, they were often filled out by hand in cursive, making them difficult for simple OCR tools to decipher.
Using AI to transcribe the visa applications and export them as tabular data was a breakthrough. I scaled down the number of data points I collected to hew close to information the different forms shared. As a result, I collected: the consulate or embassy location, the brides’ and soldiers’ names, their birth locations, date and location of marriage, and location the couples planned to reside in the U.S., as well as the husbands’ rank, branch, and date of naturalization if foreign-born, and the names, if any, of the wives’ children. The next phase of my project will be using remaining grant funds to hire a research assistant to help me comb through my data set and correct any errors. Although the output is not perfect, HandwritingOCR has sped up the process considerably and led to exciting discoveries.
My data set will help complicate the existing picture of war bride couples. In addition to revealing information about the brides themselves, this data set sheds important light on their soldier husbands. I have identified numerous Asian soldiers who married white British, French, and German women. These soldiers include a Hawaiian-born soldier of Japanese descent and Filipino soldiers, several of whom have not appeared in extant studies.[2] Some historians have acknowledged the existence of Black war brides, yet the women have largely gone unnamed.[3] I was thrilled to discover the visa application for Marie Loger Holland, a Black war bride originally from Martinique, who married Will Holland, a Black cook serving with a Troop Train Meal Service Detachment. Each of these couples contributes to our greater understanding of the relationship between colonialism and the First World War.
In the future, I plan to make my data set widely available for further scholarship with plans to use the location data for GIS applications to visualize migration patterns. I am thankful to the IEHS Digital Seed Grant Committee and everyone on IEHS Digital Projects Committee who shared advice, particularly Dr. Heather Lee, who introduced me to HandwritingOCR, and Bryan Zneghut-Willitz for talking through methodologies.
[1] Susan Zeiger, Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Applications of the Wives of Members of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, ca. 1919- ca. 1920, RG 59, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
[2] Roland L. Guyotte and Barbara M. Posadas open their article on Filipino veteran naturalization with the story of Philippine-born sergeant Cesario Agudo Buensuceso and his marriage to British war bride Elsie Buensuceso. Roland L. Guyotte and Barbara M. Posadas, “Interracial Marriages and Transnational Families: Chicago’s Filipinos in the Aftermath of World War II,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25 no. 2/3 (Winter-Spring 2006), 134.
[3] Nina Mjagkij, “Forgotten Women: War-Brides of World War I” Amerikastudien 32 no. 1 (June 1987), 191.