VA’s Digital Cemetery Grows To Memorialize More Than 4 Million Veterans
Senior Airman Domic Surinaga performs taps at a veteran’s funeral Dec. 16, 2016, in Queens, New York. US Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Christopher S. Muncy.
An online memorial to America’s veterans and service members has expanded to include individual pages for nearly 500,000 people buried in dozens of state, territorial, and tribal veterans cemeteries.
The new additions join a collection of around 4 million pages on the Veterans Legacy Memorial website paying tribute to those interred in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 155 national cemeteries.
Users of the Veterans Legacy Memorial website can search for a deceased veteran by name, branch of service, war period, and cemetery. Individual veterans’ profiles include the period they served in, service branch and rank, any decorations they may have earned, and exact burial plot within their final resting place. In many cases, searchers can even see a photo of the veterans’ grave marker.
While the information provided on most Veterans Legacy Memorial pages is fairly sparse (and in most cases comes directly from the inscription on a veteran’s headstone), family and friends can also upload written tributes, biographies, photos, and historical documents to their loved ones’ pages.
The 93 cemeteries added to the database are all recipients of funding through the National Cemetery Administration’s Veterans Cemetery Grants Program, according to the VA.
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Hannah Ray Lambert is a former staff writer for Coffee or Die who previously covered everything from murder trials to high school trap shooting teams. She spent several months getting tear gassed during the 2020-2021 civil unrest in Portland, Oregon. When she’s not working, Hannah enjoys hiking, reading, and talking about authors and books on her podcast Between Lewis and Lovecraft.
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