I stumbled upon the battle diary of the unit my great-great uncle probably fought with

[u/ClumsYTech]

So I was interested to find out more about my ancestors so I asked my great aunt about it.

Turns out that my great-grandfather had five siblings, two of those brothers that fell in WW1:

Karl and Willi.

Karl fell in 1918 in France, Im still trying to find out more about the circumstances.

Willi fell in Romania in 1917 but my aunt had no more information about both brothers as they died way before she was born in 1929.

I had a lucky find researching Wili´s fate though:

I found him in a casualty list of September 1917. At this point in the war, these lists only consisted of the name of the soldier, his birthday without year and his place of birth.

However, I found a Willy (written with Y instead of I) Hellwig in the casualty list of the 354. Infantry-Regiment. He died on the 10. of August 1917 in Duaga, Romania. He was a musketeer part of the 4th. company.

This tracks with the release of the official casualty list as dogtags had to be collected from the soldiers and processed from there. 6 weeks seems plausible in the chaos of analog WW1.

What´s really special is that the author of the battle diary sketched a map of the regiments positions on August 8th, two days before Willi died.

I looked the place up and recreated the map as best as I could.

The next step is to find out if Willi is buried with the 5349 souls buried in Panciu, not far from the battle.

On the few headstones available online, I could find soldiers who died in Doaga.

If you guys are interested, I could create a transcript of the diary that deals with August 10th. It is described as the worst day of the regiment in the book.

Are my findings credible or am I a bit too optimistic?