What was the name of a woman doing on a WWI memorial?

When Holly Baxter comes across the name Lillian on a First World War memorial, she sets out to find out why this person has been commemorated alongside the military dead

Odd one out: the memorial in Brooklyn’s Saratoga Park (Holly Baxter)

In Saratoga Park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn – really more of a small green than a park, with a lawn for dogs and another section of playground surrounded by pre-war brownstone houses – stands a small monument to local dead from the First World War. Standing in front of it this week, in my snow boots, I scrolled through the names out loud: Harold, Arthur, Thomas, Harold, Arthur, Arthur, James, John, Arthur, Thomas. Then my internal reading mechanism snagged on an unexpected addition: Lillian M Patterson. What was this woman doing among the named military dead on a monument erected in the early 1920s?

My husband wondered if Lillian might be a name that went the way of Ashley or Evelyn, starting out as an exclusively male moniker before sliding down the perceived social scale to become unisex and then, eventually, almost exclusively female. But I’m a name nerd, and I knew that Lillian had never been male. Indeed, a quick search on the US government’s social security website shows that in the early 1900s, Lillian consistently appeared in the top 15 of all given names to baby girls (interestingly, it began to fall out of favour by the mid-1920s and stayed relatively unpopular until 2009, when it began to climb upward in popularity again with a vengeance.)