09/01/2026
Check this out! Thanks to Ghosts of the Battlefield!
Here is her interview: https://share.google/eORIGEOXrn96yIaUG
We Found Her: Genevieve Bowen Returns to the Wall
Sometimes preservation begins with an artifact. Other times, it begins with a face looking out from an old painting and a name waiting to be recovered.
While researching this portrait from our newly acquired Women Marines collection, we identified the woman as Genevieve Bowen of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Genevieve enlisted in 1944, trained at Camp Lejeune, and served at Parris Island, where she helped process approximately 1,500 Marines returning from the Pacific and carried administrative responsibilities far beyond her rank of private first class.
Then the story took another turn. We discovered that the surviving painting once had a companion piece, but that second portrait is now missing.
We could not recover the original painting, but enough information survived for us to bring it back in another form. Using the surviving imagery, the original portrait, and the details of Genevieve’s uniform as our guides, we created a digital reconstruction of the missing companion. It is not the lost original, and we would never represent it as such, but online the two pieces can finally be seen together again.
That feels particularly fitting because Genevieve became an accomplished painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and metal artist after leaving the Marine Corps. She spent more than seven decades creating art, and now art has helped return her own face to history.
Tomorrow, Genevieve Bowen—her portrait, her name, and her story—will take her place on the wall of our Women’s Gallery. A missing painting may never physically return, but the woman it represented will no longer be missing.
We found her, and now others will know her name.
Thank you to the Woman’s Marine Association for the donation and to Jeannine Franz for helping us find her.
