Before 2022 there was no accurate publicly available list of the World War II fallen buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
That is about to change.
Not only is this list a few weeks away from being completed, there will soon be a story available for each of these fallen heroes that can be read at their gravesite or memorial via smartphone.
Six months ago, Stories Behind the Stars started with a bare bones list of Arlington National Cemetery burials from 1941 to 1946 provided to us by Arlington National Cemetery. We augmented this with another list that was provided to us by Find A Grave, a division of Ancestry.com. This combined list included more than 15,000 names. A group of three dozen volunteer researchers have been going through these records one by one. They have been sorting out names of family members of WWII fallen buried with them and also those who died during the war years but served before that time.
We have about a thousand names left to research, but we should end up with a final list of 8,000 WWII fallen buried or memorialized at Arlington National Cemetery.
Thanks to the help of eight volunteer section directors, and more than 100 volunteers, we have been going through every section of Arlington that has World War II fallen and writing a story about each of them. As of this writing, we have completed all the nearly 2,000 stories for 40 of the 50 sections with WWII fallen. More details here. Our volunteers are currently working on six sections (4, 8, 11, 17, 19, and 20). We are halfway through the 800 names.
You can find all the completed Arlington National Cemetery stories here. All can be read at the gravesite via smartphone (example here).
There are four additional sections we will need to work through - sections 3, 12, 18, and 34. These have about 5,300 names.
We could use the help of more volunteers to get through these remaining names.
It only takes 2-3 hours to research and write a story. Training and research material is available at no cost. To request more information, visit here: https://www.storiesbehindthestars.org/volunteer
Questions? Email don@storiesbehindthestars.org.
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