Federally-funded project unearths stories of veterans in Grafton area national cemeteries

Apr. 29—GRAFTON — While many veterans go to their graves having never told their families what they did during wartime, an effort is underway here in West Virginia to capture their stories.

The second year of the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project just wrapped up and the stories of 18 veterans buried in Grafton will soon be online for the public to read and learn about. Those stories join 19 biographies written during the 2021-22 school year by students at Grafton High and West Virginia University.

One of the soldiers honored in this year's project is that of Alva Clifford Groves, who spent his youth in Monongalia and Marion counties, and died in the Korean War.

"To serve one's country obviously is an act of public service, but what these teachers and students have done is equally an act of public service. Without them, without history, without honoring the lives of the veterans interred in these national cemeteries, these stories would not be told," West Virginia Humanities Council Executive Director Eric Waggoner said.

On April 24, Waggoner and fellow Humanities Council colleague and West Virginia National Cemeteries Project Program Officer Kyle Warmack were joined by others involved in the project to celebrate another year of hard work. The humanities council teamed up again this year with graduate history students at West Virginia University and students at Grafton High who researched and wrote biographies of service men and women who are buried in the national cemeteries in Grafton and Pruntytown. The project is funded by a $137,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and its Veterans Legacy Grant Program.

"I work with the teachers and with the students — I'm just sort of a middle man between all of it — I know what everybody's doing at some point or another," Warmack said. "So we have a team of WVU graduate students from the history department that we work with that also assist with the research and the editing and such. So, I work with them. I work with the Grafton High School teachers, and to a limited extent with the students themselves."

Warmack sees the students when they take field trips to the archives at WVU and to the national cemeteries in Grafton and Pruntytown. This year, they also toured the Arthurdale New Deal community in Preston County, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Pittsburgh and the archives and special collections at the University of Pittsburgh.

"...and try to keep my finger on the pulse of where the students are at in their research and suggest leads and coordinate how our researchers on the back end — what we're finding to help keep them from getting in a rut," Warmack said.

Grafton High students get exposed to the type of research knowledge that is usually gained on the master's level in college. They have to find primary sources, search for any firsthand accounts of the service member's life and any secondary sources that are valid and help tell their stories.

When the school year began, Warmack had a list of veterans that he and the WVU students had already checked to see how readily available information was on them.

"We'll say 'maybe check out the 1950 census and that will give you some information on the mystery you're trying to solve. They start, generally speaking with Ancestry and Fold 3 and newspapers.com. They look at census records, military draft cards, city directories," Warmack said.

Grafton High Librarian Becky Bartlett works closely with Warmack on the project while juggling her primary duties at the school. She said this project is the kind of stuff she thrives on.

"I'm learning a lot. The kids are learning a lot. It's been a great project. I mean research-wise, I don't think you could pick any subject matter to be better researched, especially here locally in Grafton with the national cemeteries being here — the only two in the state," Bartlett said.

She said this year, the project went much more smoothly because they had better access to such resources as Ancestry.com, and other books on military history.

Both she and Warmack are now skilled in knowing the types of questions that need to be asked and answered about the veterans they are assigned to write about.

"Where was my veteran at different stages of life? How many kids were in the family? What occupations did their parents have and that sort of thing. And, from there, they start widening the circle. That's where, if you know that your veteran was a Navy nurse, for example, maybe you start looking for books that tell you what Navy nursing was like during the period that they served," Warmack said.

Warmack said students learn a lot about life in the military, both in combat and peace time.

"There's an excellent online archive at Texas Tech that has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of unit records, so that's where we can really get into some of these units and say, 'If I find out my veteran was here in this unit, in this timetable....I don't exactly what my veteran was doing on a given day, but I can tell you if his unit was fighting, whether they rotated off the line and that sort of thing," Warmack said.

Bartlett said there were twins that the students wrote about this year and it led the students to having to go and find the blueprints for the ship on which they served in the ship's galley.

"Each time they were under attack, the people who worked in the kitchen had to come to the deck and man the guns. Well, we didn't know that and we learned about that and by seeing where they got us the blueprint of the ship, we could see where they exited the galley and came up to the guns and manned the guns and how they receded in the deck. It's just amazing stuff. It's just amazing what we've learned," Bartlett said.

Addressing the students, Waggoner said he was impressed with their work and the connections they unearthed about each veteran.

"And one of the really, really wonderful things to me as I walk around the room is how when you read through these biographies, when you look at these presentations, you see how behind each serviceman and servicewoman is an entire network of events — some of them had to do with the national history of the civil rights movement, women's issues — others that had to do with things we think of as being much more public — home, the family, the community — all of those stories are around us in the room today. All of them are a part of who we are and all of them have been honored by the students who participated in this program," Waggoner said.

He said everywhere he's gone in the past two years, all people ask him about is the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project.

"So you students should know, that people are paying attention to it, not only because of the great work you've done, but because of how you're honoring this city, this community, this state and this nation and these servicemen and women," Waggoner said.

Kenneth Holliday, learning resource officer with the Veterans Legacy Program, traveled from Washington, D.C. April 24 to take part in the ceremony thanking the students for their work. He said the West Virginia project is the only one of the six in the nation in which high school students are involved.

He said there is a common thread in what veterans' family members tell him after they've read their loved one's biography.

"There have been many instances over the years, as we do these student-based projects, that they will research a particular veteran and will uncover information that even that veteran's family didn't know about them and we're able to give that gift to a family — the story of the veteran's service and what they did," Holliday said.

To learn more about the West Virginia National Cemeteries Project, go online here at wvhumanities.org.

Reach Eric Cravey at 304-367-2523 or ecravey@timeswv.com.