Two Oregon women spend years sifting through ashes to give veterans a proper burial

Carolyn Arntson and Denise Hatch stood in a dimly lit storage room at Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial Funeral Home, searching through hundreds of boxes — stacked floor to ceiling — of cremated remains.

Here, in a place of such conspicuous death and loss, the duo searched for remains of military veterans left behind and abandoned. Some have sat on these shelves for more than a century.

“There are just rows and rows and rows of cardboard boxes,” Arntson said.

It’s all part of a multi-year effort to sift through the thousands of names left here, find any veterans and have them interred at Willamette National Cemetery.

“If we’re looking for veterans, we need to find this guy because he needs to be with his fellow comrades at Willamette,” Hatch said. “We’re excited because that’s one other veteran that gets to be buried and placed where he really belongs.”

The phenomenon of cremated ashes left abandoned at funeral homes is not unique to veterans, or to Portland Memorial. Funeral homes all over the country have remains that loved ones never picked up, that instead collect dust in seclusion.

Robert Gaskill, owner of Estacada Funeral Chapel, said it’s not uncommon for funeral homes to have several boxes of remains, because employees were unable to contact relatives or the deceased had no next of kin.

“Every funeral home I’ve ever worked at has a closet full of unclaimed cremated remains,” Gaskill said. “It’s very common.”

But the scale at Wilhelm’s is something else altogether. Having first opened in 1901, it’s home to nearly 100,000 deceased people, all kept in a sprawling eight-story building with miles of intricate hallways.

And within these walls, more than 2,000 unclaimed remains are stored in various corners of the mausoleum, waiting for someone to claim them.

The search is on

For years, Arntson has cataloged gravesites for an online database called Find A Grave, and she would regularly get requests to find a certain person, only to realize the person was never buried.

As she and Hatch began looking into this further, they realized many were veterans.

“It makes me wonder why they were not picked up,” Arntson said. “It makes me very sad that we had veterans who gave their time and energy to our country and for them to be left like that.”

So she and Hatch decided to go through every single box of remains, more than 2,000 total, and attempt to find which ones were veterans.

Because many of these remains had no record on the internet, it was a painstaking and tedious process. The two women spent days sorting through physical records kept at the mausoleum, which resemble library card catalogs, trying to find each one kept in storage.

Once they had a name, the real work would begin. They ran names through newspapers, veterans archives and genealogy websites, anything that might tell them if someone had a record of military service.

Each person also needed proof of military service in order to be buried at Willamette National Cemetery. It’s not an easy feat when records are scattered far and wide, and many of these people served in a time before Social Security numbers.

Sarah Lewis, a family service advisor at the mausoleum, said Arntson and Hatch came in weekly for multiple years as part of the project.

“It takes an extra special person to care enough about these people that served our country,” Lewis said.

They hit many dead ends along the way. Some veterans had no records or were found to be dishonorably discharged. Some boxes had no name and were in such poor condition that ashes poured out the sides.

“You’re looking at hundreds of people and you go to all the spots … and you’re just not finding anything,” Arntson said. “Sometimes you just have to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and move on.”

After 10 years of searching, they found 34 veterans that qualified for burial. One served in the Civil War for the Union, while others served in the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II.

One, Winifred Ada Maybery, was a nurse during World War I. Another was a 2-day-old baby, who qualified for interment because his father served in the Navy.

Even now, little is known about the lives these people led. There are no pictures of any of them. Oftentimes, there was only a death certificate or military service record. If Arntson was lucky, there might be a short obituary in the newspaper.

She kept coming to any loved ones these people might have had, wondering how they left the world with so little of their time spent on Earth.

She speculated, “A lot of people just don’t feel comfortable around death and maybe figured that the mausoleum would bury them on their own.”

The veterans await their final stop

The women had taken the final boxes out of storage and gathered them all together on one table, where they awaited transport to their final resting place. Arntson said she felt “triumphant.”

All those years of work will come to fruition on June 1, during a ceremony at Willamette National Cemetery. They will receive military honors, and there will be guest appearances from local politicians and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. The public is invited to attend.

“It will be a way to honor, not just these 34, but the other veterans who have either given their lives or have given their time,” Arntson said.

She admits it’s just a drop in the bucket — there are thousands of other remains still in storage that may never receive a proper burial.

Still, the years of effort have been worth it. After so much time spent researching these people’s lives and advocating for their remains, she says it feels like saying goodbye to close friends.