Woman works to identify veterans whose remains have not been claimed

Woman works to identify veterans whose remains have not been claimedWASHINGTON — In funeral homes across the country, basements and storage rooms contain thousands of unclaimed remains, including those of U.S. veterans.
Sometimes families, for a variety of difficult and emotional reasons, couldn’t claim the remains. Sometimes the deceased had lost contact with loved ones. And in some cases there weren’t any loved ones at all.
Funeral directors call them “closets of memory.”
Chastity Booth, a stay-at-home mother from Randolph, Ohio, near Akron, has a mission: She wants to identify Ohio’s unclaimed veterans and put them to rest, with military honors, in Ohio’s veterans’ cemeteries.
So far she’s found five. And if no one claims the remains, she hopes to have them buried in Dayton National Cemetery, hopefully by late this summer.
“They cared enough to sign up to serve our country,” she said. “We don’t want them to be forgotten.”
Last week, two Ohio lawmakers introduced a bill aimed at making the task of identifying unclaimed veterans easier.
Booth, 32, is the state coordinator for the Missing in America Project, a project that aims to claim the cremated remains — cremains — of U.S. veterans and put them to rest with military honors. Nationally, volunteers for the project have visited 1,423 funeral homes out of about 54,000. They’ve identified 9,050 unclaimed cremated remains, and verified 1,277 as veterans. They’ve interred 1,049 with military honors.
Booth got started in March of this year. She’s from a military family, with three uncles serving in the military, and she first began volunteering for the Patriot Guard, a motorcycle group whose members attend funerals of military veterans. The mother of three — with one more on the way — quickly found the travel required untenable.
While looking at the Patriot Guard website, she found a link to Missing in America project as well as a new calling. “When I took this on, I thought, ‘if I can get one vet, I will consider that a triumph,’” she said.
Here are the five identified so far. The first four died in 1987 and the last one in 1991:
• A World War 1 veteran discharged from the Navy in 1918.
• An Army private discharged in 1945.
• A Navy S1C discharged in 1946.
• An Army staff sergeant discharged in 1949.
• An Army TEC 5 discharged in 1946.
All were part of a list of 68 unclaimed remains from the Cook & Son-Pallay Funeral Home in Columbus.
Booth is now trying to contact the veterans’ next of kin, a lengthy process that could include advertising in local papers to locate family members. She says she won’t name the veterans until she has done all she can to reach the family members.
And if Dayton becomes their final resting place, she wants to make sure the service carries the traditional pomp and circumstance a military funeral requires. She said she will invite the Patriot Guard to escort the remains from Columbus to Dayton, and she hopes to get a veteran to read the names of all five men before putting them to rest with their peers.
The five Ohio veterans are part of a group that nationally includes, in Missouri, five Civil War veterans, including a husband and wife whose remains had languished on a shelf since 1923. They were buried last September, according to Fred Salanti of Redding, Calif., founder and executive director of the Missing in America project.
The group organized in 2006, and has barely scratched the surface of identifying unclaimed remains as veterans, Salanti said. In some cases, wary funeral homes have resisted turning over records on their unclaimed remains, nervous about litigation. In other cases, state law has made it rough. Ohio, for its part, last year passed a law that allowed the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs to dispose of abandoned or unclaimed remains of people entitled to be buried in a national cemetery.
U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Twp., said the federal government also needs to take action. Last Thursday, he and Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Columbus, introduced a bill that would direct the secretary of Veterans Affairs to work with veterans service organizations and groups like the Missing in America Project to help determine if unclaimed remains are of veterans eligible for burial in a National Cemetery.
If the remains are veterans, if there’s no next of kin, and if there are no available resources to cover burial and funeral expenses, then the VA will cover the cost of the burial. The bill would also call on the secretary of Veterans Affairs to create a database of veterans identified in the project and effectively encourage funeral homes to participate in the project.
Tiberi said he’s spoken with the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee about the bill, and is hopeful about its prospects. John H. Fitch Jr., senior vice president for the Advocacy Department for the National Funeral Directors Association, said funeral directors often store those remains for years, never knowing if a family member decades later will opt to claim those remains.
Some states allow funeral directors to dispose of unclaimed remains after a period of time, but even then, funeral directors are hesitant to do so. The Missing in America project, he said, gives them the opportunity to dispose of unclaimed remains with “the appropriate military honors.”
But some funeral directors have still been hesitant to turn over the information because they weren’t fully aware of the group’s mission.
Tiberi’s bill, he said, gives funeral directors comfort knowing they’re turning over remains appropriately.
Steve Ebersole, commander of the 12th District American Legion, Department of Ohio, first notified Tiberi about the issue. He said he’s hopeful the bill will ease any bureaucratic hurdles that prevent unclaimed veterans from being interred.
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