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People Names and Dates


Full Name	Otto John Peterson
AKA Full Name
People ID	681264
Title
First Name	Otto
AKA First Name
Nickname
Middle Name	John
AKA Middle
Patronymic/Matronymic
Priorsurnames
Surname	Peterson
AKA Surname
Father's Surname	Peterson
Mother's Surname	Hamre
Suffix
Gender	Male
Full Birth Date If Known	1915-03-14
Birth Year	1915
Birth Month	3
Birth Day	14
Full Death Date If Known	1940-09-27
Death Year	1940
Death Month	9
Death Day	27

Events, Dates and Places

Event	Date	Geo Top Level	Geo 2nd Level	Geo 3rd Level	Geo 4th Level
Birth	1915/03/14	Canada	Alberta
Residence	1916	Canada	Saskatchewan
Residence	1926	Canada	Alberta	Two Hills	Willingdon
Residence	1932	Canada	Saskatchewan	Lloydminster	Lloydminster
Death	1940/09/27	England	Kent	Sevenoaks	Edenbridge

Relationships

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Relationship	Related To	Relative's People ID	Relative's Birth Year	Relative's Death Year	Other Date (typically Marriage Date)

Military Service

Rank If Known Or Highest Or Final Rank	Branch of Service	Beginning Date if Known	End Date if Known
Flying Officer (RAF and some other air forces)	Royal Canadian Air Force

Military Actions Served During


World War II

Interment, Inurnment or Memorialization Information


Cemetery	Brookwood Military Cemetery
Address	A324 (Dawney Hill) south of Gole Road and north of School Lane
City/Town	Brookwood
County/District	Woking
State/Province	Surrey
Postal/Zip Code	GU24 0JB
Country/Principality	England





Organization
Property Type
Has Marker	Yes
No Marker
Is Cenotaph
GPS/LatLong Coordinates
End of Interment Record	If there are additional interments or cenotaphs for this person they will appear below

Inscription Information

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Other Information

Biographical or other information about the person

https://mills-sfv.com/Genealogy/GLS/People/Text/681264.txt

For some reason a few people have decided that Flying Officer Peterson was from Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I have researched him as much as I can over the internet and I can confidently say he was NOT from the U.S. and probably never lived in the U.S. at any time. I know some American flyers lied about their nationality to sign up with the RAF or RCAF during WWII, but Otto J. Peterson was not one of them. He has a clear paper trail, he shows up in the Canadian census records from 1916 and 1926, and numerous British Commonwealth records attest to his status as a Canadian national.

His Find A Grave memorial is almost correct, it lists his hometown (where he and his family lived in the 1930s) in Saskatchewan as his birthplace rather than Alberta, but it's a lot closer than the articles I've found online suggesting that Peterson was from the USA.

The only thing I can think of was that somewhere Alberta (Canada, the province he was from) was garbled by someone as Atlanta (the city in the state of Georgia in the USA) and as we all know, once something gets out on the internet that's wrong, there seems to be no corking that genie back in the bottle.

Here is a link to one of the newspaper articles that got it wrong. It's on GenealogyBank, which requires a subscription, but I'll quote the relevant section below the online link.

Atlantan gave life for Britain

Marietta Journal - Sunday, Jul 08, 1990 - Marietta, GA
Page: 12B

"Kenneth G. Wynn lists them in his book Men of the Battle of Britain"

"The Americans killed were Carl R. Davis, William M. L. Fiske, Otto J. Peterson (this page), and Hugh W. Reilley."

"Peterson, born in 1915 in Atlanta, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to get into the war and reached Britain in June 1940."

Wynn also mentions the spurious claim that Hugh Reilley was born in Detroit. He gets it right that Reilley lived in Ontario. He's not the only one who got that wrong, Alex Kershaw made the same mistake in his book The Few (which is otherwise an excellent book, but marred by a few mistakes here and there).

Reilley's documentation shows he was born in London, Ontario. He apparently spent some time living in Detroit with his father, but spent most of his early life in Canada and almost certainly considered himself a Canadian, not an America. But at least there is some basis for the confusion around his nationality.

In any event, there were some families that went back and forth between the U.S. and Canada and some of the American flyers who enlisted in the RAF or RCAF might have come from those families. However, Otto Peterson does not appear to be one of those wild geese.

The newspaper article above was quoting Kenneth Wynn's book, so that particular error in this case can be traced back to that book. Very likely it goes back farther than that, but I really couldn't say.

BTW, I did consider the possibility there was another Otto Peterson from Georgia who joined the RCAF during WWII. A doppelganger, if you will.

It's certainly a possibility, but the paper trail for Flying Officer Otto J. Peterson is crystal clear and unambiguous to say the least. It says his parents were P. H. (P. for Peter, in this case) Peterson and his mother was Magdalene Hamre Peterson. Those are the parents found in the 1916 and 1926 census records from Saskatchewan and Alberta, respectively, which place Otto in Canada and list his birthplace as Alberta.

So there you have it, F.O. Peterson can and should be honored for his service and his sacrifice. But as a Canadian, not an American, because that's what he was.

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Small notes (field in database 50 characters max)
Family Search ID	LV8S-T8Z
Find A Grave 1	17665798
Famous per Find A Grave
Famous per Consensus
Find A Grave 2
Find A Grave 3
BillionGraves Record ID
Other websites
Record Entry Date	2020-07-02 22:31:43
Record Last Edit Date	2020-07-02 22:31:43

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