Colorado veterans go through hundreds of unclaimed cremated remains to give comrades a dignified memorial

Monday, May. 27, 2024

A motorcycle escort rumbled slowly along the pavement that cuts through meandering rows of identical white headstones at Denver’s Fort Logan National Cemetery, making its way toward a pavilion where dozens of military veterans converged under a brilliant late April sky for a long-overdue rite.

While bagpipes played, 13 men in crisp white dress shirts beneath black vests bearing patches signifying their military affiliations each accepted a wooden box unloaded from the back of a hearse. Solemnly cradling them in white gloves, some with trembling hands, they delivered sets of cremated remains to a table.

Once the boxes had been laid in a row, a folded American flag next to each, uniformed onlookers snapped a salute. The bagpipes quieted and speakers took their turn bestowing full military honors — and a final resting place — to men who had served their country in wars and peacetime. Men who returned home and fell in love, started families, launched careers, died too young, lived into their 90s.

What they shared, apart from military service that ranged from World War II to Vietnam, was the absence of a dignified end. For reasons often unclear, their cremains had gone unclaimed, sometimes for decades, before a Colorado veterans group began a painstaking search to find them — and dozens of other veterans whose forgotten ashes sat on mortuary shelves all along the Front Range. 

The Honors Burial Program, launched by Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1071 in Denver with the first ceremony in 2016, so far has identified and honored 143 veterans in an ongoing project that has recognized service dating back to World War I.

“It’s always emotional,” says Bill Bridges, the current director of the VVA chapter’s program who served in the Army during the Vietnam war. “I think 37 volunteers is what it took to put one of those ceremonies together, and the respect that they have for their fellow veterans is what keeps their interest in helping. It’s rewarding to do this.”

Several individuals and organizations work together to conduct the “final roll calls.” Woodworkers craft custom boxes to hold the cremains. State records custodians help identify veterans from among the hundreds of unclaimed individuals. College students research their often opaque backgrounds to provide even a sliver of detail and context to their lives. Veterans honor guard and motorcycle details lend solemn ceremonial touches. One volunteer even bugles “Taps.”

It’s an effort that has been gaining momentum. The Colorado project mirrors national efforts to find and perform a dignified memorial for unclaimed cremains of veterans.

In the latest ceremony, on April 30, Fox31 news anchor Jeremy Hubbard delivered remarks that touched not only on this group of 13 veterans’ military service, but the lives they led afterward and the often unknowable circumstances that left them in sometimes decades-long limbo before their fellow veterans afforded them a final salute.

“We may never know the path that brought these men here today, but we know after decades of uncertainty, their journey finally ends right here and right now,” Hubbard said, “that they may finally rest in peace, knowing that a grateful nation appreciates their service, and is forever filled with gratitude.”

An effort born of history

For Bridges, motivation behind the effort stems from the national Vietnam Veterans of America motto: “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” That promise was shaped by the shared experience of seeing returning veterans of Vietnam become targets of widespread domestic opposition to the war.

“Soldiers weren’t seen in the best light coming home,” Bridges recalls. “So I think a lot of our members remember that. We need to do something, if we can, to make sure that these other generations of soldiers are not treated the way we were.”

The idea began to take shape in 2015, when members of the VVA chapter met at the Lakewood Elks Club for breakfast and sat around tables drinking coffee and talking about current events. Someone brought up a national news item that estimated more than 100,000 veterans had been cremated but never claimed — and hence, never given the military honors to which they were entitled.

“So a couple of guys thought, well, we need to start poking around some of these funeral homes and see what we can find,” Bridges says. “Are there really a bunch of unclaimed veterans out there?”

In fact, there were. At one Aurora cemetery, volunteers found almost 900 sets of cremains. At least some almost assuredly belonged to veterans, but the next step would involve determining how to identify them.

Calls to the Veterans Administration revealed a verification process in place for unclaimed cremains, but it requires background information that in many cases wasn’t readily available. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s vital records division, though, could cross-reference its database of death certificates, some of which verified military service. 

Those data hits could then be run through the VA records center in St. Louis or even the Department of Defense to find more specific information such as branch of service, length of active duty and confirmation of honorable discharge — all of which help determine eligibility for military burial honors.

Only official veterans service organizations like Vietnam Veterans of America, bolstered in Colorado by state law, are empowered to investigate unclaimed cremains at mortuaries, funeral homes or cemeteries. That helped clear the first hurdle — reluctance of some funeral businesses to share such information.

“There’s a difficult aspect of getting in the door and being able to work with someone that will let you come in and do the work,” Bridges explains. “But once you get over that hump, we’ve got our volunteer teams that come in and we do everything. And when we’re done, we hand them an inventory of everything that they’ve got. And from that point, then they know that we’ll take care of all of the veterans, get them taken care of at a national cemetery, and they no longer have to worry about them.”

But he adds that while his volunteers have been able to work with the larger mortuaries and funeral homes in the region, there’s still hesitancy among smaller operations, which at times have left him frustrated and scolded not to bother calling back. For Bridges, that makes telling the story of his organization’s efforts critical to raising awareness of the program’s legitimacy.

Inheriting hundreds of unclaimed urns

When he bought the Stork-Bullock Family Mortuary last July, Peter Morley found that previous owners had in storage more than 300 sets of unclaimed cremated remains dating back to the 1950s.

It’s not unusual for cremains to be left behind, Morley says. Although sometimes it happens through miscommunication or misunderstanding, other times a human services agency can put a person who has died without surviving relatives, or someone who’s homeless, into what’s called a rotation, whereby a mortuary is paid for either burial or cremation — normally cremation, because it’s less expensive.

That’s how some end up in storage for years. Morley estimates there are thousands more unclaimed at funeral homes across Colorado. 

As he oversaw the business transition to Stork-Morley Funerals and Cremation as managing partner, Morley already had been thinking about how to honor all of the forgotten cremains he’d inherited. Coincidentally, that’s when Bill Bridges approached him about the Honors Burial Program for veterans.

Morley was on board with the program — his great-grandfather served in World War II, his dad served in Korea and his wife did a year’s tour in Iraq, so the program definitely struck a chord with his family’s military history. 

But he also understands how some mortuaries would be skittish about risking publicity by partnering with the veterans project, especially in the wake of recent news reports exposing alleged misconduct in the funeral home business.

“Most mortuaries would be scared, I think,” Morley says. “Even when Bill called me originally I was a little bit reluctant. I was just like, ‘Let me think about it.’ And I kept on telling them we’re ready to do it, I’ve just got to figure out how the process is going to look and things like that. And he was very reassuring to me.”

Morley says it quickly became clear that the veterans group had a significant head start on a process to determine which of the deceased might have served in the active military. 

Bridges reached out to his VVA membership for volunteers to start examining urns and putting together an Excel spreadsheet. Fortunately, some of the veterans already had experience with that application. One brought along a laptop as well. 

Two teams began the sorting process. One volunteer would select an urn, read the name and date and then look for a matching name in the ledger. When they found a match, they’d enter the information into a database and assign it a serial number.

Bridges refers to their protocol as  “on-the-job training.” But he’d meticulously mapped out a process based on his decades of experience designing business protocols for maximum efficiency in the telecommunications industry. 

“It was just a process that I had cooked up because there was nothing written down before I took over this role in terms of how to do this,” he says. “I gotta have a process and I have to be able to train the people on how the processes work and get them to become as efficient as they can possibly be.” 

Combing through handwritten ledgers

Morley was impressed at how quickly volunteers inventoried the urns and determined there were 27 entitled to veterans’ burial honors, which took place in two ceremonies two weeks apart last month. Not only did the veterans identify those who qualified for honors burial, but they also provided Morley with an inventory of the other cremains, which he’s planning to inurn at a separate site rather than leave them in storage.

“I had 334 cremated remains,” he says, “and they went through all 334 to verify if they qualified to be buried at a national cemetery. That’s huge.”

As it turned out, the process involved some low-tech record keeping by the funeral home’s previous owners that ultimately proved beneficial.

“We got really lucky with them,” Bridges explains, “because back in the day, all of their business was done in handwritten ledger books. And there were 50-some of these ledger books where each page is an individual record for someone that they took care of. Some, the binding was coming apart. And others were in pretty good condition.”

“We were pretty fortunate that they all had great handwriting,” Morley adds. “So we were able to read everything.”

The volunteers began their work at the Stork-Morley crematory in Denver early last November and ultimately inventoried everything in three separate three-hour sessions. Matches between dates in the ledger book and information on the urns eventually were cross-referenced against the state’s vital records database and then federal records. 

But identifying which cremains were veterans was hardly the whole story. While on rare occasions an urn turns out to have been left due to miscommunication among family members, who when informed of the oversight could then step in to provide background on the deceased, many more remained mostly mysteries.

Some college history students stepped in to unravel them.

DU class dives into backstories

Camille Cruz, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Denver and daughter of an Army veteran, had no grand expectations when she signed up for a generic-sounding Issues in Comparative History course before the start of the January term. 

But then Cruz, an anthropology major with a minor in history, felt her curiosity and enthusiasm grow as the instructors unwound the syllabus on the first day and explained that students would be working to expand the often sparse backgrounds of military veterans whose cremated remains had been gathering dust on the shelves of area funeral homes.

The class, which quickly filled with 40 students, grew from another effort that history professor Carol Helstosky and teaching partner Elizabeth Escobedo had embraced in 2017 through the National Cemetery Administration called the Veterans Legacy Program. 

The DU professors contracted to set up a website called More Than a Headstone and then supervised students in research on veterans buried at Fort Logan. The result has been a growing database of diverse human stories that lend texture to the near-identical rows of white markers that dot the green landscape.

Through those efforts, Helstosky came into contact with VVA Chapter 1071 and learned of the Honors Burial Program. She and Bridges agreed that student researchers could complement the work that VVA volunteers were doing to identify the unclaimed cremains by putting their research skills into practice.

And that’s how, last January, she brought a new twist to the Issues in Comparative History class. 

Bridges had 27 names of confirmed veterans — the newest group after the 116 his organization had already honored — and the DU students, singly or in pairs, set about researching whatever background they could find.

Part of the objective was to dispel inaccurate judgments that often accompany the unclaimed cremains — that these individuals were estranged from family, fell onto hard times or got into trouble that caused relatives to disregard them. Solving the mystery of why they ended up on a shelf in a storage room, instead of resting in a marked location, motivated the students, Helstosky says. 

“So what my students have found out is in many cases, they’re just ordinary people, many of them wind up being the last family member who passes away, and I guess the remaining relatives or surviving relatives are too distant, or there are none,” she says. “And no one claims the cremains. So they’re fascinated by that story.”

Much of the sleuthing was basic genealogical research, through resources like ancestry.com or fold3.com, which focuses on military records. But a good portion of the work also fell smack in the wheelhouse of young adults who have grown up using social media as second nature.

“A lot of time in college is spent in a classroom learning about history,” Helstosky says, “and that’s all fine and good. But this project, working on these biographies, is meaningful to students because they’re really putting their skills to work, and they’re doing it for a purpose that they have great respect for.”

When Cruz scanned the brief information on the first of two veterans she would research, she was troubled by circumstances of his death she thought might have pointed toward the veteran experiencing homelessness when he died. Calling on connections from an earlier internship with the Denver Medical Examiner, she contacted the Arapahoe County coroner and discovered key elements of the man’s backstory.

He hadn’t been homeless at all, but had died in his sleep after symptoms of illness at a farm where he’d been working. She felt that even that small detail, in the absence of a deeper narrative, provided a certain sense of dignity. 

“I have a personal passion with the treatment of the deceased with my current internship,” Cruz says, “and so it was really meaningful to be able to reignite the memories of these people. It really is just sad and disappointing that so many people go unclaimed, and their lives aren’t known, especially U.S. veterans.”

She attended one of the two “final roll call” ceremonies at Fort Logan, where her veteran was given full honors. “And that was where it was so palpable,” she says, “to witness that ceremony and to see all of the veterans and supporters there to gather and remember these people who they didn’t know. But they were still honoring their lives.”

Sparked by her experience with the Honors Burial Program, Cruz’s work with veterans will continue through another internship with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which deals with the location, identification and repatriation of the remains of U.S. soldiers lost during foreign conflicts. Cruz will help with tasks like DNA analysis, histology, bone identification and administrative cataloging.

Meanwhile, the DU professors plan to launch students on another round of investigations in January to find background on those 116 veterans already inurned at Fort Logan under the VVA chapter’s program before the university joined in the effort.

Eventually, those biographies that student researchers can flesh out will go up on More Than a Headstone, and perhaps be linked to a national database. It’s research that perhaps isn’t always the traditional archival type that historians do, Helstosky says, but it touches on skills native to her students and the desire to be of service.

“So I would say they enjoy the research for that reason,” she says, “because it’s something that they’re good at, so they feel good about being able to use their skills to help others.”

A job unfinished

The April 30 final roll call ended with a veteran standing before each box of cremains while, one by one, the name of the deceased was read.

“Present,” said the veteran, speaking for each of them while a bell chimed once and the uniformed onlookers saluted.

When all had been recognized, the seven-man honor guard raised its rifles and squeezed off three volleys. Then the sharp crack of the last shots segued into the solitary notes of the bugler blowing “Taps,” and then a final prayer and the rising hum of the bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.”

Cemetery management determines where the cremains are inurned. Many go to a columbarium, though the rising popularity of cremation has put space there at a premium. The urns holding the cremains of the 27 veterans honored in April were buried in a section of the cemetery where gray markers, flush to the ground, note each one’s name, branch of service and where they served, along with birth and death dates. 

Awards for valor also are noted.

“Our work continues,” Bridges says. “We won’t rest until we find them all.”

Later, he talks about next steps, about how the process has been put in place to do right by veterans who served, lived and died, only to have their memory fall through the cracks. But only for a while.

The program’s focus remains along the Front Range, where Bridges still struggles to find funeral homes that will admit to having unclaimed cremains that could be run through a check for veterans among them. But he did get a call recently from the Arapahoe County coroner’s office asking if he’d check five unclaimed cremains. Four of them turned out to be eligible veterans, whom he plans to honor in mid to late June.

Additionally, he’s working to confirm information that another funeral home in the Denver metro area has about 120 unclaimed cremains, in hope that he and his volunteers can schedule a time to conduct an inventory and begin the verification process. They’ve found, on average, that about 10-12% of those unclaimed have served.

“There’s so much more to do,” Bridges says. “The challenge is doing the legwork with all of these family funeral homes. It’s almost a given that they all have unclaimed cremains of some kind, and they don’t know if they’re veterans or not.”

At Fort Logan, the crowd slowly dispersed, and the motorcycles rumbled back to life. Eight years after the first committal honored 30 veterans, Bridges and his organization feel like they’ve constructed an effective system for following through on the motto of never abandoning their comrades. He has even been finalizing an operations manual so future volunteers won’t have to start from scratch.

As the crowd filters away, VVA chapter president Stan Paprocki offered a final thought on the committal of these 13 veterans who have finally been laid to rest.

“They’re where they should be,” he said. “Buried with soldiers.”

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