Photo by Ross Gallabrese Jim Rinaldo holds photos of his uncles, James Giordano, left, and Michael Carlone, who were killed during World War II.

TORONTO — A search by a German historian led to a discovery that touched the lives of a Toronto man and his family.

Last fall, Toronto’s Jim Rinaldo said that, in advance of Memorial Day, the daughter of a cousin who lives in Columbus received a call from Torben Haunhost, a historian in Dortmund, Germany.

He explained he was trying to open a museum and had been searching for World War II artifacts in France. One of his searches led him to a barn, where he found a U.S. helmet with its serial number intact.

That helmet, Rinaldo said, belonged to his uncle, James J. Giordano. A bullet hole in the side of the helmet marked where the Army sergeant had been wounded June 22, 1944, in Tollevast, France. Rinaldo said information from various sources indicated his uncle was shot while Allied forces were attempting to capture the port of Cherbourg, then a German stronghold.

Giordano, who had landed at Utah Beach, died from his injuries July 2, 1944, at age 26. He is buried in the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in northwestern France.

“I never met my uncle,” Rinaldo said of the man he was named after. “I was born in 1948 and he died in 1944.”

Giordano was from Wellsville, Rinaldo said. He served with the 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division, 8th Corps.

“My grandmother had 10 kids,” Rinaldo said, recalling Giovina Giordano. “When she was a little girl, she broke her hip while playing with her brother. There was no doctor and she always walked with a limp. But she raised her kids.

“My grandfather had hit-and-miss jobs and my uncle worked at Crucible Steel in Midland,” he continued. “My uncle could have gotten a hardship deferment, but he didn’t.”

That was not the only wartime loss that touched his family, Rinaldo said.

Another uncle, Michael Carlone of Waterbury, Conn., died when his P-51 Mustang was shot down over Germany near the end of the war.

Rinaldo said his father’s two sisters traveled by train to visit their brother at Randolph Field in Bexar County, Texas. His father had enlisted a year before Pearl Harbor and was serving in the Army Air Corps. While in Texas, one of the sisters met a cadet, Carlone, and they later married and had a son.

Carlone’s last station in the United States was in Florida, Rinaldo said. His wife and child then went to Connecticut to stay with in-laws. He was granted a short leave to visit family before being sent to Europe.

Rinaldo said his family knew what happened to Carlone, who flew with the 8th Air Force, because an accompanying American plane returned to base that day and the pilot filed a report. Carlone, he said, had shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 and destroyed two locomotives before being shot down himself.

His cousin, now 86, told him the story, Rinaldo said. Her father had been serving in the Army, and her mother had been working in Weirton Steel and living with his grandmother in 1945.

Rinaldo said Carlone’s parents traveled by train to Steubenville to visit his grandmother for the first time. While they were there, they received a telegram notifying them he had been shot down over Germany. The baby died within a year, Rinaldo added.

His grandmother, Rinaldo said, wore black for the rest of her life.

Rinaldo said he had eight uncles who served in the military, adding that a second cousin, Rocco Salatino of Follansbee, was killed during the Anzio Beachhead invasion of Italy.