Sunday, October 29, 2006

Veterans Affairs Gravesite Locator

A colleague asked me to find where one of her uncles was buried - he apparently died in World War I. So I immediately thought of Joe Beine's Military Indexes site here.

When I selected World War I data, it led me to the Veterans Affairs Nationwide Gravesite Locator site, which is free, at http://gravelocator.cem.va.gov/j2ee/servlet/NGL_v1. I put in the name she had given me, and his information came up (the site is fairly slow, so be patient).

The web site says:
.
Search for burial locations of veterans and their family members in VA National Cemeteries, state veterans cemeteries, various other military and Department of Interior cemeteries, and for veterans buried in private cemeteries when the grave is marked with a government grave marker.

The Nationwide Gravesite Locator includes burial records from many sources. These sources provide varied data; some searches may contain less information than others. Information on veterans buried in private cemeteries was collected for the purpose of furnishing government grave markers, and we do not have information available for burials prior to 1997.

The data for my father shows:
SEAVER, FREDERICK WALTON
MAM3 US NAVY
WORLD WAR II
DATE OF BIRTH: 10/15/1911
DATE OF DEATH: 05/26/1983
BURIED AT: SECTION V SITE C-189
FT. ROSECRANS NATIONAL CEMETERY
P.O. BOX 6237 SAN DIEGO, CA 92166
(619) 553-2084

They even tell you where they are buried in the cemetery, provide a link for a map, and a phonen umber to call if you need help. Great government service, eh?

Then I thought to myself - this is good data to put in my Seaver one-name study, so I put in "Seaver" as the surname and got 119 hits. I spent a little time saving each web page of results in my Seaver surname file. The challenge now is to get it all into the database.

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