The remains of 28 Civil War veterans and many of their wives are receiving burial services across the country. As first reported by the Associated Press, their discovery concludes a decades-long mystery about their whereabouts while highlighting numerous stories previously lost to history.
Copper and cardboard urns housing the cremated remains spent the past “several decades” housed inside a Seattle funeral home’s storage facilities, according to the AP on November 4th. While each container included the names of the deceased, none of them included markers indicating any clear ties to the Civil War. That’s when volunteers from the Missing in America Project, a nonprofit dedicated to identifying unclaimed veteran remains, stepped in to help. It took several years of genealogical research, but the volunteers eventually concluded that all of the soldiers fought for the Union during the war.
“It’s amazing that they were still there and we found them,” Tom Keating, MIAP’s Washington state coordinator, told the AP. “It’s something long overdue.”
While organizers buried the majority of the urns in Washington State’s Tahoma National Cemetery, others are scheduled for transport to Washington State Veterans Cemetery. One Navy veteran will also receive a traditional burial at sea, and additional urns will be reunited with family in Rhode Island, New York, and Maine.
[Related: Maryland historical society finally identifies 100-year-old mystery machine.]
As the AP notes, MIAP’s research matched many names to historical records of veterans’ lives both during and after the war. Many soldiers were wounded in combat, often at major battles such as Stones River and Gettysburg, but survived until long after the Civil War’s conclusion. An estimated 620,000 soldiers died during the conflict—roughly 2-percent of the US population at the time. In 2024, that would equate to around 6.74 million deaths.
In one instance, a man survived a gunshot only due to his pocket watch deflecting the bullet, while another joined the Union army after deserting the Confederacy.
“When you have somebody who served in a war but especially this war, we want to honor them,” Donald Grebien, the mayor of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, told the AP following the burial service of one veteran. “It became more intriguing when you think this individual was left out there and not buried in his own community.”
