Confirming Uncle Russ’s Military Service

Brown-Montran Line
By Don Taylor

When I set out to confirm Russell’s Korean War service, my search on Fold3 turned up only his draft card — no service record at all, which genuinely surprised me given how confident I was about his military service.

Uncle Russ’s Draft Registration

Russell registered for the draft on August 29, 1945 — his eighteenth birthday, and just months after his January commencement from Southwestern High. The card places him at 8542 Olivet Street in Detroit, working at Western Auto’s Woodward Avenue location, his first documented job before the electrician’s work he’d take up by 1950. The registrar’s physical description gives us the young Russell in miniature: five foot eight and a half, 142 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, light complexion — “none” listed under other identifying marks, about as unremarkable a description as a Selective Service clerk could offer a boy who’d already crossed an ocean twice before he could walk. Perhaps the most telling detail, though, is administrative rather than physical: the card lists his mother as the person who would “always know his address,” and records her not as Donna Montran or Donna Knight, but as “Mrs. Russell Kees” — her apparent common-law married name.

Uncle Russ’s Military Service

With no military record for Uncle Russ turning up on Fold3, I tried Find-A-Grave instead, and there I found his niche marker. I’d seen buildings like the one housing his niche before and always wondered what they were called — turns out the word I’d been missing is columbarium, a building of niches for cremated remains. Along with a photo of the niche marker itself, Find-A-Grave also had a photo of the columbarium where he’s located. That niche marker at the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona gave me exactly the confirmation Fold3 couldn’t: Russell had been a corporal in the U.S. Army, and he served in Korea.

Donna’s Partner: Russell Harrison Kees’s Draft Card

While I had draft records on my mind, I went looking for Russell Harrison Kees’s card as well — the man my mother and uncle took their surname from, though Donna’s partner never married her or legally adopted either of them. The 1940 census had listed Donna as his wife, but his February 1942 draft card tells a different story: the person he named to “always know his address” was the Commonwealth Loan Co., at the National Bank Building in Grand Rapids — not Donna. That suggests the relationship had ended sometime between April 1940 and February 1942.

That timing raises its own puzzle. In a 2001 letter, my mother told me that she, Donna, and Uncle Russ moved to Detroit in 1941, “after Harvey’s death.” But Harvey Knight didn’t die until May 1942. So something doesn’t line up — whether it’s the date of the move, the reason for it, or my mother’s memory of the sequence, I can’t yet say. What is clear is that the breakup with Donna’s partner and the move to Detroit both happened somewhere in that same narrow window between 1940 and 1942.

Russell Harrison Kees

• Born: May 4, 1899, Milwaukee, Wisconsin — likely a WWI veteran, given his age and the shrapnel wound noted below
• Residence: 37 Shelby St. SW, Grand Rapids, Michigan
• Employer: McInerney Spring & Wire Co., 655 Godfrey Ave. SW, Grand Rapids
• Description: 6′, 225 lbs, hazel/brown eyes, gray hair, light complexion; shrapnel wound to left kneecap

Sources:

• WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940 – 03/31/1947, Ancestry, Russell Erwin Kees – Order Number 14618. WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940 – 03/31/1947.
• Find a Grave, Russell E Kees, CLP, USA, Korea – 1927-2016. Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/161134930/russell_erwin-kees: accessed July 24, 2026), memorial page for Russell Erwin Kees (29 Aug 1927–16 Mar 2016), Find a Grave Memorial ID 161134930, citing National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona, Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona, USA; Maintained by Mark Utley (contributor 47178748).
• WWII Draft Registration Cards for Michigan, 10/16/1940 – 03/31/1947, Ancestry, Russell Harrison Kees – Order Number 11398.

This post was researched by the author, drafted with the assistance of Claude.ai and edited with Grammarly.