  It has been previously proposed that some distant open clusters in the Milky
Way may have been accreted during a dwarf galaxy merger, perhaps associated
with the same event that led to the formation of the Galactic anticenter
stellar structure (GASS), also known as the ``Monoceros Ring''. We have
obtained VI and Washington+DDO51 photometric and medium resolution (R ~ 8000)
multi-fiber spectroscopic data for the three distant old open clusters Berkeley
29, Saurer 1, and vdB-Hagen 176 (BH 176). These clusters are spatially
coincident with GASS, but radial velocities and spectroscopic metallicities had
not been available during previous studies of the GASS candidate cluster
system. Similar data for the clusters Berkeley 20 and Berkeley 39 have been
obtained for calibration purposes. We provide the first {\it reliable} radial
velocity for BH 176 (V_{helio} = 11.2 +/- 5.3 km/s). We also find that
V_{helio} = +95.4 +/- 3.6 and +28.4 +/- 3.6 km/s, for Saurer 1(A) and Berkeley
29, respectively. We show that alpha-enhanced isochrones, while
spectroscopically motivated, provide a poor fit to Be29 in contrast to previous
findings. We find that the clusters Berkeley 29 and Saurer 1 are consistent
with the previously reported characteristics for GASS candidate clustersand the
GASS stellar stream as derived from M-giant observations. However, the radial
velocity and photometric metallicity ([Fe/H] ~ 0.0 dex) for BH 176 suggests
that a connection of this cluster with the putative GASS cluster system is
unlikely. We reassess the age-metallicity relation for the most likely members
of the GASS clusters system for which spectroscopic metallicities are now
available.
