A Name on the Wall and a Place in the Family: The Story of Jack L. Clark
On July 13, 2026, Dickie Webb visited the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten with his daughter, Jamie, to meet the Dutch family who had adopted his uncle’s name on the Wall of the Missing. For more than a year, Dickie and Judith Bouwens had exchanged emails, photographs, family stories, and discoveries about Second Lieutenant Jack L. Clark. Now they could stand together at the place that had brought them into each other’s lives. “We welcomed them into our home, our country and our hearts,” Judith recalled. “We have become something of a family to one another, and I am incredibly grateful for that.”
Jack served as a bombardier with the 349th Bomb Squadron, 100th Bomb Group, during World War II. His name is commemorated at Margraten, where Judith and her family honor his memory. Their meeting with his nephew was the beginning of a new chapter in a tradition of remembrance that Judith’s grandmother had begun decades earlier.
A Grandmother’s Legacy
Judith’s grandmother, Fien Bouwens-Willems, experienced the Second World War as a young girl in Sint Geertruid, a village near Margraten. A mother of eight and an active member of the local heritage society, she passed her love of history on to Judith.
After the war, as soon as it became possible, Fien adopted the grave of American service member Roy G. Wander at the Netherlands American Cemetery. She cared for it faithfully. As those visits became more difficult for her, Judith joined her, helping carry on a commitment that would eventually become her own. When Judith and her husband, Micky, had their children, Sam and Vicky, they brought them along from the beginning. After Fien died, the family continued tending Roy’s grave. Their photo albums now record the children growing a little older each year beside his headstone.
For Judith, those visits are part of teaching her children to understand the freedom they inherited and the sacrifices that made it possible. “These things do not happen automatically,” she explained. She carries that same conviction into the cemetery tours she gives to schoolchildren through the Old Hickory Fund, sharing the history her grandmother helped her appreciate. Years ago, when Judith and Micky learned that some names on the Wall of the Missing had not yet been adopted, they immediately volunteered. The name entrusted to them was Jack L. Clark.
Finding the Family Behind the Name
Judith wanted to know more about Jack: his life, his family, and the people who might still remember him. She contacted the 100th Bomb Group Foundation, where Matt Mabe began searching for relatives. In 2025, his efforts brought her into contact with Jack’s nephew, Dickie Webb, in Tennessee. Dickie had not known that a family in the Netherlands was honoring his uncle’s name. For Judith, the connection offered a chance to learn about the man whose memory her family had been caring for. For Dickie, it opened a new chapter in research he had undertaken with his mother, Ruth Clark Webb, Jack’s sister.
Ruth had pursued an extensive correspondence to learn what had happened to her brother, preserving letters and information in a scrapbook. Dickie had helped her with that work and still treasured the material she had collected.
Now he returned to those records with someone new to share them with. “You’ve rekindled my flame about Jack’s sacrifice,” he wrote to Judith. Their correspondence grew into a shared undertaking. They exchanged photographs, revisited letters, and assembled details of Jack’s life and service. Jamie helped scan the family’s materials and prepare a scrapbook documenting the story. Judith incorporated what she learned into her cemetery tours, helping visitors see the person behind the name on the wall. Alongside the research came news of children, holidays, work, and everyday life. They began calling each other cousins.
From Correspondence to a Visit
In January 2026, before he knew he would make the journey, Dickie wrote to Judith about a scene he hoped might someday become possible. He imagined her standing at the wall, telling Jack’s story to a group of students, while he listened from the back of the class. By July, Dickie and Jamie were in the Netherlands, meeting Judith and her family in person and visiting the cemetery together.
During the visit, Judith and Dickie exchanged books with personal dedications. Judith gave him Robert M. Edsel’s Remember Us, writing: “Thanks for our incredible journey together. Jack made it happen. So happy that I can now count you as family.” Dickie gave her You’re the Actual Best, a title that echoed an expression of appreciation that had become familiar in their messages. Inside, he wrote: “Our journey has been the greatest unexpected pleasure of my life.”
In the afterword to their scrapbook, Dickie described himself as “the nephew he never knew.” He thanked his mother for sharing her search with him, Judith and Micky for honoring Jack, and Jamie for helping preserve their story and taking him to the Netherlands. The scrapbook now brings together the work of several generations, preserving both Jack’s story and the friendship that grew from remembering him.
Preserving the Connection
In November 2025, Dickie completed the Forever Promise Project questionnaire, formally recording his relationship to Jack and his connection with Judith. He had learned about the project from her, and both wanted their story to encourage other families to seek similar connections.
Their relationship illustrates the importance of documenting bonds that have already begun to grow. Recording the American relatives and Dutch adopters connected to a service member helps preserve those relationships as generations change. For Judith and Dickie, the next meeting is already something to look forward to: they plan to see each other again in Tennessee.
Judith’s grandmother could not have known where her decision to adopt an American soldier’s grave would lead. Nor could Jack have imagined that, more than eighty years later, his nephew and a Dutch family would come to regard one another as family.
The Forever Promise Project connects relatives of American service members buried or commemorated at the Netherlands American Cemetery with the Dutch adopters who honor them. If your family has a loved one buried or memorialized there, we invite you to complete our questionnaire and help preserve these meaningful connections for future generations.
We are grateful to Dickie Webb and Judith Bouwens for sharing their story, to their families for carrying this remembrance forward, and to Matt Mabe of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation for bringing them together.
If you have a Forever Promise Project story you would like to share, we would be honored to hear from you. Please write to us at info@foreverpromise.org.
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