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Missing in America Project works to inter the unclaimed remains of veterans

The St. Augustine Record - 6/14/2017

For the last five years, Kathy Church has volunteered a portion of her time working to secure a proper, final resting place for men and women who have served their country. It is quiet, solemn work that gives her satisfaction.

"This is my way of giving back to the veterans," Church said Wednesday, sitting in a conference room at The Record.

She had just left Craig Funeral Home where she and a small group of volunteers will be focusing their efforts in the coming months.

Church is the Florida coordinator for the Missing in America Project, an organization that identifies and collects the unclaimed cremated remains of veterans and has them interred in national cemeteries.

The national, nonprofit organization started in 2007.

Since that time, it has located just shy of 15,000 remains - often referred to as "cremains" - and identified 3,418 of those as veterans.

Of those, 3,131 have been interred at national cemeteries.

Church, who has been doing the work since 2012, shared a little the process on Wednesday.

Many funeral homes, she said, have unclaimed remains stored at their facility and most of them don't have the time, manpower or resources to track down family members.

Knowing this, volunteers with the Missing in America Project, or MIAP, work across the country to find those that are veterans and, instead of having them sitting on a shelf in a funeral home, do the footwork to find loved ones or have them laid to rest at a national cemetery.

At Craig Funeral Home, she said, there are about 100 unclaimed remains. She figured it would take her and other volunteers about six months to a year to sift through the information.

Those eligible for burial in a national cemetery are veterans, as well as the spouses and dependents of veterans. MIAP will find a resting place for any of them.

To determine eligibility, the volunteers have to secure specific pieces of information including date of birth, date of death, Social Security number and birth place. If they don't have all of that, the information they do have gets sent to a genealogist to fill in the missing parts.

Once all the information is collected and eligibility confirmed, it gets sent off to the National Cemetery Scheduling Office for approval.

The group also sends letters via certified mail to any known living next of kin. If none is known, or exists, they also publish an "intent of action" in local newspapers.

"If we don't hear from anybody, then we have permission from the VA to inter them," Church explained.

"Once we get approval and say 20 at a time, then we schedule a service at the national cemetery," she said.

Church is quick to say that she doesn't do all of this alone. She said she has about 10 people across the state who make these things happen including a volunteer genealogist, an urn maker and a coordinator who gets active-duty personnel for the services.

The services, she said, are "full military, with honors" and include the playing of taps, a volley and folding of the flag. An active-duty service member, from the branch in which the deceased veteran served, places the urn in the columbarium niche, she explained.

Since MIAP started operating in Florida they have held five ceremonies at the Jacksonville National Cemetery, one in Sarasota and five in South Florida. About 200 Florida veterans have been laid to rest, she said.

Church, who is a member of the American Legion Auxiliary Unit 233 in Ponte Vedra Beach, said she started volunteering after an assistant state coordinator gave a talk about the project at the Legion post.

"In a 10 minute speech, he got me hook, line and sinker," she said. "I couldn't believe someone was sitting unclaimed."

Since starting, Church has seen family members - many whom never knew their loved one's remains went unclaimed - moved by the group's efforts.

Two brothers, who were 13 and 21 when their father died, never realized their mother hadn't picked up his remains, but MIAP found them years later.

"Back in 2014, they attended a service Jacksonville," she said.

A daughter who lost her dad to a car crash when she was 2 showed up at another service.

"She never knew his cremains sat on a funeral home shelf all those years," she said.

"I could go on and on with the stories I have."

Gus Craig at Craig Funeral Home said he is happy that Church and others have taken an interest and welcomed her in.

"We are just delighted to have her here to do it," he said in a brief phone interview on Wednesday.

Church is too.

She said some funeral homes are reluctant to even acknowledge they still have the remains, which is why she agrees to talk with newspapers and other outlets whenever she is asked so she can explain what her group does.

No one in MIAP gets paid for their time "not even our president," she said, which means the group needs more volunteers, but it also needs more facilities to give them access.

Church said she is working to build relationships with other funeral homes as well as crematoriums and medical examiners offices across the state.

If she got more volunteers, she said, she would like to build a stronger statewide network.

"We are doing great things with the team we have," she said. "But we do need help."

"My goal is to get a team close by where every cemetery is," she said.

For information about the Missing in America Project, visit www.miap.us. To contact Florida representatives email miapjax@yahoo.com or call Church at 219-3035.