The Department of Veterans Affairs has added more than 210,000 veterans to its online memorial project for U.S. veterans, including pages for Americans buried in cemeteries overseas.
Ahead of Memorial Day, the VA announced it has expanded its Veterans Legacy Memorial website to include those interred at locations overseen by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the federal agency that manages U.S. military burial sites in Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
“The brave Americans resting in American Battle Monuments Commission cemeteries and whose names are inscribed on ABMC memorials around the world sacrificed their lives to liberate allied countries and to protect our nation’s interests,” Acting Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald Walters said in a statement last week. “It’s our honor to preserve their legacies.”
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The VA launched the Veterans Legacy Memorial website in 2019 to highlight former service members buried at national cemeteries, giving loved ones the chance to tell their veterans’ stories by adding service records, remembrances, photos, historical documents and more to their personal pages.
The program later was expanded to include VA grant-funded cemeteries, those managed by the Department of Defense, U.S. Park Service cemeteries and private cemeteries where veterans have received a VA-provided grave marker since 1996.
The project now includes more than 10 million pages, with more than 200,000 submissions made to veterans pages, according to the VA.
Earlier this year, the VA announced that it will allow veterans to build their own VLM pages, uploading images, autobiographies, military achievements and life milestones — anything they would want someone to know about them — before they die.
To use this VLM feature, known as “Your Life, Your Story,” veterans must be eligible for burial in a national cemetery and have received pre-approval by the VA.
They then will be able to log into a secure area of the site to create their pages; the content will go live once the veteran passes away and the VA approves their family’s request for burial or other memorial benefit.
VA officials have said the next goal for the VLM is to add the names of veterans who received VA-issued grave markers before 1996.
The ABMC has managed overseas veteran graves since 1934, when President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order mandating that the agency oversee eight military cemeteries in Europe. It currently administers 26 American cemeteries overseas, caring for more than 124,000 graves and memorials dedicated to roughly 94,000 who are missing in action, lost or buried at sea.
“We are proud to be a part of this partnership, which adds new resources to honor our nation’s veterans from all wars and brings their stories to those who aren’t able to visit our ABMC sites overseas,” ABMC Acting Secretary Robert Dalessandro said in a news release last week.
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