A clipping

It's been a very long time since I posted here. I've been taking breaks from research because I keep running into brick walls. I even let my Ancestry membership lapse since I felt like I shouldn't be paying the money when I wasn't logging in regularly. But something about springtime always makes me want to dive back in to genealogy. Maybe it's because spring is a time of year when I feel more energized and motivated in general. Or maybe as the trees begin to bud and the flowers start to bloom, I'm reminded of the cycles of life and how my own family history is a part of that larger picture, and I feel a renewed sense of connection to my ancestors, their lives, and their experiences. I still have an active subscription with newspapers.com. I found a tiny snippet just last week that I hadn't come across before, about my grandpa Ballard's time in the Army during World War II. Here it is: 

Source: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/120558028/james-d-ballard/ 

Note that my grandpa doesn't have the same last name as the couple listed as his parents. Those are his foster parents; he lived with them from age eight until age eighteen when he enlisted. He never really knew his biological parents. For all intents and purposes, the Holmeses were his real parents. I do not know why they never formally adopted him. This clipping looks like such a small bit of information, but it tells me so much. I never knew Grandpa was at Fort Benjamin Harrison, nor did I know he went to Camp Adair. After finding this clipping, I read some information online to learn more about Camp Adair, and got a better idea of what my grandpa's time there was like. 

I miss my grandpa and wish that he was still here so I could talk to him about his life, ask him questions about his foster parents, and about his biological sister from whom he was separated after he went to go live in the Holmes house. So many unanswered questions, the recollection of so many events that are lost to the passage of time. There's no one left to ask. My grandma, who was married to my grandpa for 44 years at the time of his death, died in 2003, and my mom died five years later in 2008. Anyone I could consider a primary source is gone. If my grandpa was still alive he'd be turning 99 in August. I can't picture what he would have been like at 99 years old. When he died, he was only 70, and I was only 13. Back then, as a 13-year-old, he seemed so old to me. Now that I'm 41, age 70 doesn't sound that old at all. My own dad is older than that now - about to be 75. 

I've wanted a photo of my grandpa as a young man for so long. I have never been able to locate any. I refuse to believe that in the decade he lived with the Holmeses, no one ever took a picture of him. I have pictures from after he met my grandma. But I want pictures from before that. I want to see him as a child, a teenager. Someday. Someday, somehow, I will. There's got to be something out there.