Baltimore Sun Writes About Remembering a Fallen Police Officer

While working on a lecture related to women’s suffrage in Maryland, I tripped across some records about a Bel Air police officer falling in the line of duty in 1920. The memory of this tragedy had been lost as time moved on, so I handed the information over to the Bel Air Police Department. A detective immediately got to work on documenting the incident.

To support the department’s investigation, I picked up those fading traces in the historical records.  After finishing my fieldwork in Harford County, Annapolis and Baltimore, I provided a historical records report to the agency.

Recently, Bel Air completed its work and the officer’s ultimate sacrifice will no longer forgotten. He is going to be listed on the National Law Enforcement Memorial.  Over the decades, I have found officers in Wilmington, Clayton, and Crisfield who fell the line of duty, but were never listed on memorials, nor remembered n their communities. In those places, a similar process generally happened.

The Baltimore Sun and Aegis picked up on the story and wrote an article “Gone But No Longer Forgotten, Bel Air Police Searching for Family of Fallen Officer from 1920, published on July 8, 2015.