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Memorial Day NPR/BBC MIAP Interview
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Forgotten for years, 26 vets will finally be laid to rest
Thursday, May 6th, 2010Valerie Olander / The Detroit News
Dearborn — They fought in conflicts from World War I through Vietnam, yet the remains of 26 servicemen sat unclaimed for years, seemingly forgotten by the country they served.
Now, thanks to a Dearborn veterans’ group, they will finally be laid to rest this month with full military honors. On Memorial Day, a horse-drawn caisson will carry a flag-draped coffin with the soldiers’ cremated remains down Michigan Avenue, beginning a ceremony that will end with a military burial in Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly.
“It’s unbelievable that no one has taken their remains, no family or friends,” said Joe Terry, commander of VFW Post 2107 in Dearborn. “The whole object of this is to show honor to our veterans, to show the city what being in the military is all about.”
Terry worked for several months to match the names of the deceased veterans with military records, called DD-214 forms, to confirm the remains were eligible for burial in a national cemetery. Seventeen have been certified as eligible.
The 26 sets of ashes have been stored in cardboard boxes or plastic urns on funeral home shelves for up to 72 years.
The oldest of the remains, of a World War I veteran, date to 1938.
The unclaimed remains are mostly men, some of them indigent or homeless.
Neither Terry nor Richard Fleek, commander of the Dearborn Allied War Veterans’ Council, which is coordinating the Memorial Day honors, would identify the veterans.
Shirley Foss Thompson of McFarland Foss Funeral Home in Dearborn identified 11 unclaimed veterans there.
One World War II veteran, Warren Pike, who died March 27, 1986, at age 72, will be buried Memorial Day with his wife, Virginia. Their remains were never claimed, Thompson said.
Of the 40 unclaimed remains stored in a cupboard at McFarland Foss, 11 are veterans, she said. The oldest dates to 1978; the most recent veteran died in April 2007.
Nine other veterans were discovered at Querfeld Funeral Home and two others at Voran Funeral Home.
Officials at those two funeral homes could not be reached for comment.
At Dearborn’s Howe Peterson Funeral Home, one World War I sergeant’s remains have been stored since April 8, 1947, when he died at age 50, funeral director Jeff Lamparski said. He declined to release the name of the soldier.
The funeral home sends letters annually to the last known address of the next of kin for about 60 cremated remains being held in a special room for the unclaimed. Five are veterans.
Lamparski said the funeral home last tried to reach relatives of the World War I sergeant two years ago; the letter was returned address unknown.
Veterans groups were appalled when they learned about the unclaimed remains. The problem is not exclusive to Michigan.
The Missing in America Project has found the unclaimed remains of 6,642 veterans in 820 funeral homes nationwide. Nearly 700 have been identified and 632 of those interred, officials said.
Unclaimed veterans in the Detroit area could be in the thousands, Larry Root, the Michigan coordinator of the Missing in America Project, told city officials.
A pending state law will let funeral homes properly bury the remains of unclaimed veterans.
State Rep. Gino Polidori, D-Dearborn, sponsored two bills, one allowing the burials and another absolving funeral homes of liability in such cases.
Each of the new laws is effective July 1, although two other bills are being pushed through the Legislature by Polidori to change the laws’ effective dates to May 20, in time for Memorial Day.
His office did not return a call for comment Wednesday.
Thompson said some family members are just not ready to claim the remains of a loved one.
In one instance, a family member returned 10 years after a loved one died.
The family discovered at a Thanksgiving Day get-together that each thought the other had picked up the civilian’s cremated remains, she said.
Others have been notified and made appointments with funeral directors to pick up remains, but never showed up.
The cost of burial is not a reason for the veterans to be left behind. Burial is free at a national cemetery for veterans and their spouses, Thompson said.
Terry said he had no idea that so many have been left behind in funeral homes without a proper burial.
“We’re trying our best to rectify this and show how our veterans have been neglected,” he said. “We will be showing how they should be honored.”
From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100506/METRO01/5060411/1409/Forgotten-for-years–26-vets-will-finally-be-laid-to-rest#ixzz0n9uxH0QC
Gathering of Eagles MIAP Press Release – Kentucky Service
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010MIAP Press Release
Published: 03/22/2010 Posted On: March 22, 2010 at 8:15 AM By: Kathy
The Missing in America Project (MIAP) is a registered 501(c)3 Non-profit Corporation. Our mission is to locate, identify and inter the unclaimed cremains of American veterans. The MIAP was launched nationwide in January, 2007. Through the joint efforts of private, state and federal organizations working in concert with our volunteer organization, we now have the means to provide honor and respect to those who have served this country by securing a final resting place for these forgotten heroes.
Through one of our investigations, we found 32 cremated remains of abandoned US military veterans. This particular investigation began in 2008 and was tracked from Eastern Cemetery located in Louisville, Kentucky, to the University of Louisville Archaeology Department. These remains were eventually located in a University-owned warehouse on campus, where they had been stored for several years. It became obvious that no attempt had ever been made to identify them as military veterans who served their country, and most were veterans of WWI, WWII and Korea. This is to date the largest single recovery of cremated remains of US military veterans in the US. These remains include veterans from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Among the recovered remains are those of several officers, with the highest ranking recovered veteran being a WWII US Army major.
On February 08, 2010, members of the MIAP, along with several other veteran organizations, and after being granted a court order through the Jefferson County Circuit Court, went to the University of Louisville with an escort from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and recovered 32 cremated remains of veterans and 9 cremains of the wives of veterans.
These recovered cremated remains are now in the custody of the MIAP and a full military funeral service will take place June 14, 2010, starting out from the Louisville Memorial Garden Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. The procession organizing will occur from 9:00am until 10:00am, at which time the precession will leave the funeral home.
The procession will head south on Dixie Highway (US Hwy 31W), where it will take the remains of these formerly abandoned veterans to their final and long-overdue final resting place at the hallowed grounds of the Kentucky Veterans Cemetery, located 30 miles south of Louisville in Radcliff, Kentucky.
The Funeral Service will start at 11:00am after the procession arrives at the cemetery. We invite all citizens and veterans to line Dixie Highway and wave their American flags to welcome home these lost-but-found veterans and to honor their memories.
MIAP is extremely proud of this recovery and sincerely hopes that this event will be attended in large numbers after being abandoned for all these past years.
These US veterans will be accorded interment with full military honors on June 14, 2010.
May God bless them all, and MIAP formally thanks them for their service to their country.
Welcome Home.
A Special Thanks to Jefferson County Circuit Judge Irv Maze and the Kentucky State Attorney General’s Office for assisting with this recovery. Additional thanks go to Sheriff John Aubrey and his Deputies (especially Deputy Mike Patterson) who assisted us with the recovery on February 08, 2010.
The MIAP volunteer investigators and veterans who conducted this operation:
Dale LeMond- US Marine- MIAP Regional Coordinator—Press Contact 502-376-1755
Walt Oster- Investigator US Army Veteran Representing DAV Chapter 6 Louisville, Ky. Team 12- Retired Louisville Police Detective. American Legion Post 229
Chet Needy- US Army Vietnam Veteran-Team 12 Investigator and Funeral Escort Ride Captain.
END OF PRESS RELEASE
Unclaimed Cremains
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010By Anonymous
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Feb 09, 2010 @ 11:30 PM
Last update Feb 10, 2010 @ 08:37 AM
They are the forgotten. They are no longer the people that someone loved. Instead, they have become a chore that someone always meant to do, but never got around to. More important things got in the way.
There are many reasons why so many funeral homes have rooms where they store urns containing ashes that nobody ever claimed.
There are six or seven urns at the Hurley Funeral Home in Havana. In fact, most of the Hurley funeral homes in central Illinois have some. Staab Funeral Home in Springfield has three or four, and Vancil-Murphy Funeral Home in Springfield another seven.
It’s pretty much the same everywhere, and it is sad. Some of the remains have been stored for decades, waiting for someone to claim them and put them in a better place. Repeated phone calls from the funeral home to the family, if it can still be found, do no good.
“We try to notify people as soon as the ashes are ready to be picked up,” says Mike Hurley. “Sometimes they’ll say that, emotionally, they aren’t ready. They ask to pick them up later, and you never see them again.”
Downstairs at Staab’s on South Fifth Street, eight canisters are in containers, marked and stored on a shelf in a room full of empty caskets. In two cases, the family has directed the ashes to be kept until the person’s spouse dies. But three or four will never be picked up — including the one found next to a coffee pot at the Midas Muffler on South Ninth Street some 30 years ago.
P.J. Staab thought that call was a joke, but it wasn’t. The manager at Midas called him because a Staab sticker was on the bottom of the urn.
According to Illinois law, funeral homes need to keep abandoned ashes for only 60 days. Then it is legal to dispose of them, if done properlyBut no funeral home director I talked to will get rid of anyone’s ashes in 60 days.
“I stick to forever,” says Brian Murphy at Vancil-Murphy. “Our deepest fear is that one day someone will come and say, ‘Hey, you took care of my great-great grandfather, and I have come to take possession of his remains.’”
Even if a funeral home director wanted to give the abandoned ashes a proper burial, it would not be easy to find a cemetery that allows that to be done for free, if at all.
“We have no place to take them,” says Brian, “unless we want to pay for a burial plot.”
Of the seven abandoned urns at Vancil-Murphy, Brian says, “They are here with us and probably will be for generations.”
Not all of the abandoned ashes are in funeral homes. A couple years ago, I saw an urn on a shelf in the evidence room at the New Berlin Police Department.
Her name was Goldie. Her ashes had been found in the trunk of an abandoned car and the salvage yard called the police. That was about 10 years ago.
With the help of the internet, I was able to locate Goldie’s family. Her daughter said she didn’t even know her mother’s remains were at the police station. She thought her brother had them. After I told her where they were, she assured me that she would go to New Berlin and retrieve her mother.
Goldie is still on the shelf at the police department.
The same summer the ashes were found at the Midas shop, which was about 1980, P.J. Staab got a call from a friend who found an urn of ashes with the Staab sticker on it in his mother’s garage. Attempts to find that family failed. The urn remains on the shelf with the others.
“Sometimes it has been 10 years since the funeral,” says P.J. “and the family can’t be found.”
It could be a case of revenge as in, “Dad was a miserable so-and-so, let him stay at the funeral home. We don’t want him.” It has happened.
It could be a misunderstanding. Someone thought someone else was responsible for picking up the ashes.
It could be the ashes of a homeless person who cut ties with their family long ago.
It could be a lot of things. It doesn’t make it any less sad.
All these lonely people, where do they all come from?
Everybody has a story. The problem is that some of them are boring. If yours is not, contact Dave Bakke at 788-1541 or dave.bakke@sj-r.com. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. To read more, visit www.sj-r.com/bakke.
Copyright 2010 The State Journal-Register. Some rights reserved
Forgotten dead, in Storage
Sunday, January 24th, 2010Forgotten dead, in storage
An estimated 1% of cremated remains go unclaimed for years. But a long-lost relative just might show up.
Dozens of unclaimed human remains are stored in boxes and urns at the Cremation Society of Illinois. Funeral home policies vary on what to do with such remains: Some scatter them, others inter them, and many just let them be. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune / January 12, 2010)
By William Hageman
January 24, 2010
Reporting from Chicago – It’s a small room that could be in any Midwestern basement: paneled walls, concrete floor, low ceiling, fluorescent lights, gray metal shelves lining two walls.
But what’s on the shelves sets this room apart: more than 100 small cardboard boxes of cremated human remains.
Each box — the oldest dates to the late 1960s — has a person’s name written on the outside and cremation paperwork inside. These people lived, died, were cremated — and then left behind by their families.
People in the funeral industry estimate that 1% of cremated remains go unclaimed.
David Fisher, an independent Chicago-area funeral director and embalmer, says the average funeral home might have four or five sets of ashes sitting around.
Jerry Sullivan, president of the Cremation Society of Illinois as well as the International Cremation Federation, believes the number may be lower.
“I would say that every funeral home in the state of Illinois probably has one or two sets of cremated remains that people just never came back for,” Sullivan says.
Funeral homes’ policies differ on such abandoned remains: Some scatter them, some bury them, and some just hang onto them for — well, if not for eternity, at least in perpetuity.
“I’ve been in the [funeral] business since 1970,” Sullivan says. “My parents had a funeral home from 1952. So I’ve got some of theirs. I have some from businesses we’ve bought or inherited. . . .
“I remember we bought a funeral home, and there was a file cabinet there. We assumed it was files. Then we opened it and there were 10 or 15 sets of cremated remains. We still have them.”
Sullivan stores the remains in this climate-controlled room in one of the Cremation Society’s facilities in a Chicago suburb. Some of the remains belong to friends or acquaintances. On one shelf resides a machine shop owner he knew. Side by side on another shelf are two brothers. And he’s on a first-name basis with Mary and Roy.
“Oddly enough, to me, it feels like they’re relatives,” he says. “I feel they’re in better care with me than with somebody else.”
Illinois law is fuzzy regarding a deadline for the disposition of remains. Many funeral home directors play it safe and hold on to them out of concern that a relative might come for them later.
But how does a family member get left behind and forgotten?
Before prepaid funerals, some families couldn’t pay the bill and were reluctant to drop by the funeral home. Sometimes families aren’t especially close and no one wants to take responsibility for a distant relative. Or maybe the survivors didn’t know what to do with remains, so they did nothing.
“I think, probably, the most common reason was they just didn’t want them,” says Fisher. “They didn’t have any idea what they wanted to do, so they just left them at the funeral home.”
And the funeral director is left with the ashes.
“Usually it’s about a 60- to 90-day time when we start to encourage a family more aggressively to come on in, meet with us again,” said David Klein of Dignity Memorial, a Houston-based company that operates hundreds of funeral homes and cemeteries nationwide. “Or if there’s just no contact we’ll continue to hold them over the next two or three months as well, till a point when we feel comfortable enough — it could be nine months or a year — that we can say, OK, we’ve done our duty.”
Dignity sends the remains to a central place — a mausoleum at one of its cemeteries.
“Some funeral homes will pay to have them buried,” Fisher says. “Some scatter them, or have a scattering service over Lake Michigan.”
Says Sullivan: “I know some put them in a mausoleum niche or have a burial. It just seems impersonal to me.” So he holds on to the boxes, no matter how long it takes until someone claims them.
“Our record is nine years,” he said.
But records are made to be broken. Less than an hour after saying that, in late December, Sullivan received a call from a man seeking the ashes of his sister, who died in 1991. A family dispute with the woman’s ex-husband was the reason for the delay. The ex-husband had recently died, and the brother began pursuing his sister’s whereabouts.
Sullivan knew right where the remains were.
“He wants them buried with their mother and father,” he said later. “He wanted to purchase an urn and have us take her to the cemetery and bury her for him.”
bhageman@tribune.com
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