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  • Hispanic Heritage 2024

    Hispanic Heritage 2024

    Hispanic Americans have been a part of Battleship Texas’s story throughout her career. During the First World War, the ship’s marine detachment was commanded by Captain Pedro Augusto del Valle, an up-and-coming Marine officer from Puerto Rico who went on to become the first Hispanic USMC Lieutenant General. Over the interwar years, Texas saw many more Hispanic crew members, like Chief Machinist’s Mate Adolph Hernandez Garcia, a first-generation American whose father immigrated from Mexico in 1900. In the Second World War, Commander José Manuel Cabanillas, born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, served as Texas’s executive officer during the Invasion of Normandy. We have articles highlighting some of our Hispanic crew members below, and in this exhibit, we will look at the process of researching these men and recording their stories.

    Luis Magris

    Maurice La Montagne

    One of the challenges we face in researching any individual crew member is that we have had contact with very few of them. From 1914 to 1945, USS Texas had a crew complement of around 1,000 to 1,800 men. Combining those numbers with crew turnover rates from other ships, we estimate around 20,000 to 40,000 individuals served aboard USS Texas. But we only have files on 1,713 crew members as of October 2024, and many of those files contain only one document; an obituary, a single entry in the ship’s muster roll, or a picture with their name scrawled on the back are all common single-document files. We have had the privilege of speaking to even fewer of these men and recording an interview with fewer still. This means we have to rely heavily on primary documents to learn about most of them.

    December 1932 Muster Roll for USS Texas.

    Where do we start? Often times, we will only have a name and a general idea of when they served on USS Texas. Let’s look at this sailor, Machinist’s Mate 1st Class Luis Magris. This was our starting point, a single entry in the ship’s muster roll from 1932.

    A muster roll is a monthly or quarterly record of every enlisted sailor serving onboard the ship. The exact format of the muster rolls varied, but they will always have every sailor’s name, service number, and rating. From the muster rolls, we can typically work out the entire time period a given individual served on Texas. There are limits though. We do not have the complete muster rolls (though we are getting close), and some people will appear in different documents. Specifically, Marines, the Flag Allowance (enlisted men serving directly under an admiral), and the Aviation Detachment will all have separate muster rolls.

    Once we have basic information from the muster rolls, we can start looking for other documents. Online resources like Fold3, Ancestry, Newspapers.com, and Find a Grave are extremely useful at this point. Most of the documents we will talk about from this point on were accessed from these online resources.

    Usually, our next goal will be to find their date of birth and date of death. In Luis Magris’s case, we found this information from his Beneficiary Identification and Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) record and luckily, his name was not terribly common. BIRLS is a database created by the Department of Veterans Affairs that includes a deceased veteran’s date of birth, date of death, enlistment date, and other basic biographical information.

    Draft cards are one of the next places we will look. Draft cards were issued to most adult men for both World Wars, though you would not receive one if you were already serving in the military. Thanks to BIRLS, we know Luis Magris enlisted 27 June, 1918, so he should have a World War I draft card.

    Front (left) and back (right) of Luis Magris Tarris's WWI draft card. Courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration, via Fold3.

    This draft card is different than most. It is entirely in Spanish, because it was issued in Puerto Rico. However, it does have all of the same questions as English draft cards issued on the mainland. From this card, we now know that Luis Magris is from Puerto Rico, born in Ponce specifically, and that he was still living in Puerto Rico in 1917. That he was still there is to be expected though, as Puerto Ricans were stateless (not considered “citizens” of any nation) and unable to leave Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1917. This is because the 1898 Treaty of Paris which ceded Puerto Rico to the United States had revoked their status as Spanish subjects, but did not extend any legal status from the United States. The Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 finally resolved this issue by extending US citizenship to Puerto Ricans. That same act also extended most federal laws to apply to Puerto Rico, including the Selective Service Act of 1917 which began the draft for World War One and was passed just two months after Jones-Shafroth. Had Jones-Shafroth not resolved some of these Puerto Rican legal issues, it is possible that this draft card would not exist.

    You may notice that the name on the card is not “Luis Magris” but instead “Luis Magris Tarris”. This is because Spanish naming customs are different than English customs. The basic form of a Spanish name is to start with one or more given names (Luis), then the father’s family name (Magris), then the mother’s family name (Tarris). Sometimes the two family names are written like “Magris y Tarris” (literally, “Magris and Tarris”) and you may see “de” (of) as well. When Spanish names are Anglicized, sometimes the father’s family name is used as a middle name, but other times the mother’s family name is dropped to better match English naming customs, which is what happened with Luis Magris. Documents in English consistently give his name as Luis Magris, while documents in Spanish generally give his name as Luis Magris Tarris.

    Now that we know both his date of birth, 22 June 1896, and his place of birth, Ponce, Puerto Rico, we might reasonably be able to find him in the US Census. Puerto Rico was not counted in the 1900 census, instead there was a census conducted in 1899 by the War Department and that census is not readily available online. We did find him in the 1910 and 1920 censuses though. Both show him in Puerto Rico and these records are in Spanish like his draft card. We see his name is spelled differently though. In the 1910 census, he is “Luis Magriz y Farry” and in the 1920 census, he is “Luis Magriz”. This is because this document is not filled out by the people being counted, but by census takers who are more likely to make errors, such as misspelling names. We can be reasonably certain that these are errors because we can compare the information in the census to other sources.

    In this case, the 1920 census is more useful than the 1910 census. Specifically, the 1920 census is interesting because we know from his BIRLS record that he enlisted in 1918, and we know from the muster roll that he was in the Navy 1930-1933, yet his occupation is listed as “profesor”, which means either professor or teacher depending on the context. We have seen other men who enlisted for World War I that were discharged shortly after, then later reenlisted, which is what happened here.

    Muster rolls, BIRLS records, draft cards, and the census are some of the most common records we can usually find for a given crew member. Together, they give us a strong starting point to find more interesting things, and help us to sort out who is who when we find there are several people with the same name. In Luis Magris’s case, we were lucky and there were not a lot of records for other people named Luis Magris.

    Application for Certificate of American Citizenship, also known as a "Seaman's Passport". Courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration, via Ancestry.com

    Next, we will look at some of the less common and more interesting records. The luckiest find we had was this “Application for Seaman’s Certificate of American Citizenship” dated 31 July 1919. A seaman’s certificate of American citizenship is also called a seaman’s passport and is used by civilian seaman traveling internationally. What made this so exciting for us is that it includes a picture of the applicant, Luis Magris. This is the only picture we have of him.

    Comparing this to the other records we have found, we see the correct date of birth (22 June 1896) and place of birth (Ponce, Puerto Rico), which tells us we have the correct Luis Magris still. For “Birth (or citizenship) confirmed by” the form reads “us navy dischg fr us navy Ship “Geo Washington” Hob 7/10-1919″. “dischg fr” is short for “discharge from” and “Geo Washington” is short for “USS George Washington”. “7/10-1919” is his discharge date. We also see “Geo Wash” as his last vessel. His next vessel is given as “Bull Line”, which is short for the A. H. Bull Line or A. H. Bull Steamship Company.

    Overall, what this document tells us is that Luis Magris did indeed have a non-consecutive enlistment in the Navy and must have later reenlisted. It also contains a small story in itself. Luis Magris served in World War I and was discharged 10 July 1919 in New York, then in just 21 days he had secured employment as a civilian seaman on the A. H. Bull Line and went back to sea shortly after.

    Newspapers are another important resource we use in researching crew members. Typically, if we know where someone was living when they enlisted, we can find a notice in the local paper about it. We will usually be able to find an obituary if we know about when they passed and where they were living. In many cases, it is possible to find reports of sailors visiting home and newspapers will also have a wide variety of other reporting. In the case of Luis Magris, we could not find any of these common reports, but we did find a small series of letters to the editor he sent in to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1947.

    Letter to the Editor from Luis Magris, April 8th, 1947, Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

    There were also shipboard newsletters published on USS Texas (and many other ships), particularly in the interwar years. Texas Parks & Wildlife has made their Battleship Texas newsletter collection available online through the UNT Portal to Texas History. These newsletters are fully searchable, which makes it very easy to look for specific people. We find a few mentions of Luis Magris, two related to him being recommended for promotion to Chief Machinist’s Mate, and one reporting on his transfer to the Asiatic Station.

    There are still more documents and resources we could discuss, but this should demonstrate a lot of the basics of what we do when researching individuals. If you have a family member who served on Battleship Texas, email us at [email protected] with some basic information (name, time period served, etc) and we may be able to help you learn more about him. You can also request his service records from the National Archives online.