(2017)
Lewis Armstrong Young (1895-1918).
In October 1918, Anna and William Young received the latest letter sent to them from their son Lewis, a machinist’s mate (1st class) aboard U.S.S. Marietta, a schooner-rigged gunboat in wartime service off the coast of Bordeaux. All was well. Days later, they received an official communiqué: Lewis was dead, victim of the influenza epidemic that was sweeping the world and compounding the horror of the Great War. Lewis — a graduate of P.H.S. and of the Wentworth Institute, a technical school in Boston — had enlisted in the Naval Reserve Force in July 1917 and been assigned to Marietta a few months later. On the week that the Young family learned of his death overseas, Lewis’s younger brother, Arthur Johnson Young (1897-1919), enlisted in the Students Army Training Corps at Boston University. By the time that Lewis’s remains were returned to Provincetown from temporary interment in Pauillac, France, in 1920, Arthur had died of tuberculosis. Both boys are buried with their parents, William Henry Young (1871-1942) and Anna Morse (Hughes) Young (1872-1939). Anna and William lived to see the day, in 1934, when the Veterans of Foreign Wars instituted a Provincetown post, No. 3152, honoring Lewis A. Young, whose name the post still bears today.
¶ Last updated on 24 November 2017.
Provincetown’s Historic Cemeteries and Memorials, Key N-58, Page 14.
Find a Grave Memorials Nos. 137735554 (Lewis) and 137735627 (Arthur).