PFC Albert Denton Wingate was born 18 Sep 1917 in Grayson County, Virginia. He was the 7th of the 9 children born to John Poindexter and Daisy Belle (Lyons) Wingate. For a while the family lived in Old Town, Virginia and Albert's father drove a truck for a local sawmill. Sometime before the stock market crash the family moved to LaGrange, Georgia where Albert's father worked as a logger and rented a home at 810 Truitt Avenue for $1 a month. Older sister, Ella Maude, who was working in a cotton mill, died in 1929. The Great Depression may have changed things for the family and they left Georgia living first in North Carolina and then in Henry County, Virginia. Whatever the family's circumstances, Albert's education did not progress beyond grammar school. He married Sarah Lucille Daniel of Hogansville, Georgia and the couple had 2 sons. However, Albert found work in a cotton mill owned by Marshall Field and Company in Fieldale, Virginia earning a reported $458 in 1939 and lived with his parents there while Sarah and the boys lived with her widowed father in High Shoals, North Carolina and Sarah worked in a cotton mill there.
Albert was drafted in May 1941. He was almost certainly sent to Fort George Meade, Maryland for initial training and assigned to A Company 116th Infantry there. He then trained with the regiment in Maryland, in the Carolina maneuvers near Fort Bragg and at Camp Blanding, Florida before boarding the Queen Mary in September 1942 and sailing to England. Once in England the entire regiment began a period of intense training that soon turned to preparation for the amphibious assault that was planned in the effort to liberate France. PFC Wingate took part in that assault and was shot and killed in action on 6 Jun 1944 at Vierville-sur-mer, France.
PFC Wingate was repatriated in 1948 and re-interred in Roselawn Burial Park in Martinsville, Virginia near where is family then lived in Henry County, Virginia.
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