Red Cross volunteer
brings hope to families
in search of loved ones

John Smith tries to reunite
people separated by war and
natural disasters

By Rod Ohira
Star-Bulletin

Since he joined the Hawaii chapter of the American Red Cross as a volunteer in February 1988, John Smith has become a specialist in mending broken lives.

Smith, 60, a retired military man and former Realtor, spends six hours a day twice a week trying to reunite family members separated by war, international conflicts or natural disasters.

Smith handles about 40 cases a year and says his nine-year record has more hits than misses.

"It's sort of routine now, but I still get a good feeling when we're able to reunite somebody," said Smith, who plans to move to Florida next year.

Smith recently helped reunite 73-year-old Kapaa, Kauai, resident Ursula Naea with her half sister, Emmie Berger, whom she hadn't seen since 1939. The reunion took place in Magdeburg, Germany.

Naea's family had split up during World War II.

One case Smith is currently working on involves a neighbor-island resident who became separated from her 7-year-old daughter in 1974 before the fall of Saigon.

"She had permitted her daughter to enroll in a Catholic school and the girl may have been taken to France by a visiting nun," Smith said. "The woman had the address of the school but when she went back to Vietnam recently, the school was no longer there."

The woman has provided the Red Cross with information about the child and Smith has forwarded the "tracing form" to the Red Cross' Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center in Baltimore.

From there, the information is sent to the International Red Cross chapter in Geneva, Switzerland.

"The French Red Cross has the information so they should have found her by now if she went to France," Smith said.

Smith came across an article in "Destination: Vietnam" magazine about Ann Caddell Crawford, who taught in Saigon, and is trying to contact her to learn more about the Catholic school the girl attended.

When he receives a case, Smith starts the tracing process by checking local telephone books and city directories.

"If I don't find anything, I'll go down to the library and start checking obituaries," he said.

With a name, Smith can use other reference sources. He found a match, for example, by locating a name in the Philadelphia telephone book.

"It was an unusual name so it wasn't that hard," he said.

Sometimes, the information he has to work with is incorrect.

"A person wanted to find Russian relatives who had come here to work on the plantation in the early 1900s," Smith said. "The nickname and maiden names I had were misspelled.

"I was able to find the correct spelling at the State Archives from shipping records and marriage certificates," Smith added.

Smith expects more requests from Africa due to the conflict there.

"For a while, we were getting a lot for Bosnia," he said.

The Red Cross has assisted families of holocaust victims in obtaining information.

"They have 46 million handwritten documents, some of which were classified until a few years ago, to work with," Smith said of the holocaust information center that has been set up in Germany. "One person was looking for a sister who survived the holocaust and we were able to trace her to a Nordic country, where she died.

"The person received complete medical records and learned where her sister was buried," he said.