A Followup of Sorts

My mom wanted to go up to Bay City to lay some roses on my grandma and grandpa's graves.  Since I was there, I decided to take a picture of my grandpa's military service grave marker.  If you remember a couple of years ago, I made this post.  Well, it looks like they have been taken better care of things since then.

Anyway, as I was looking at the gravestone, I wondered what "WT1" meant.  I knew it was a rating of some sort.  I also knew that it was basically a Petty Officer First Class.  WT stands for Watertender which was a crewman that was aboard a steam powered ship.  That person was responsible for tending the fires and boilers in the ship's engine room.  It was a Petty Officer rating that went from 1884 to 1948.  In 1948, it became the boilerman rating and in 1986 it merged with the Machinist's Mate rating.  In 1986, WT became Weapons Technician.