 
Marie Antoinette Truchon, daughter of François Truchon and Rose DeLima Michaud, was born in New Hampshire on January 11, 1894. She worked as a telephone operator in Concord until she was able to attend nursing school and graduated from the New Hampshire State Hospital Nursing School in 1917. She then joined the Red Cross as a nurse and was later commissioned as an Army nurse. She travelled and worked in many places around the world before getting married. In 1930 she married a German citizen, Wilhelm Schaal, whom she met while both were living in the Philippines. Wilhelm worked as a merchant and a manager of a warehouse and a hotel in Manila. When World War II began, she and her husband and their daughter Alice survived the ordeal of Japanese occupation of Manila. They lost everything they owned. Only because Antoinette had kept her US passport and citizenship was she allowed to leave and to take her young daughter Alice with her to the United States. Wilhelm had to stay behind in the Philippines until he was approved to come to the United States to join his family, but he died in February of 1947 before making the journey. When Alice and Antoinette returned to the U.S., they initally lived in Concord, New Hampshire. Antoinette went to work as a nurse again, first in Concord and later in Los Angeles, where she later died in the 1960s of cancer. With special thanks to Diane Rice and Holly Ardinger.
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