Forgotten and on a shelf

[Gracie]

Final Resting Place for 250,000 Vets is a Tin Can on a Shelf - Trending Now on Patch - Dearborn, MI Patch

“Out West, most VA cemeteries had a lot of unclaimed, homeless, indigent veterans and they were having a service once a month,” he said. “They were burying 30 veterans at a time, with one chaplain and one funeral home director there, and no one who cared for them showing up to send them on their way.”

He saw the same in Idaho, Nevada and each of the nine Western states he covered for the Patriot Guard.

Nearly all of the nation’s approximately 23,000 funeral homes are storing the unclaimed remains of as many as 1.2 million people. In many states, there’s no law requiring funeral homes to report unclaimed remains to the Veterans Administration – or to their states, or to anyone.

“We started going into the funeral homes, and found that 10 to 30 percent of the people on the shelves were veterans,” Salanti said, pointing out that so far, the Missing in America Project has arranged for military rites and burials for close to 2,000 soldiers.

Salanti and his volunteers are finding the forgotten veterans one at a time as they scour thousands of mortuaries. Initially, Salanti and others expected the canvass to tally 10,000 or 15,000 veterans whose ashes hadn't been claimed. The actual number is probably closer to 250,000 – “and that’s a low estimate,” he says.

They’ve reached 1,500 so far.