Posts

Showing posts from May 17, 2015

Memorial Day 2015

Memorial Day is a day set aside to for the nation to remember and honor American Armed Forces members who died in war. Veterans Day, on the other hand, is a day set aside for the nation to remember and honor all who have served in the American Armed Forces. Our contemporary Memorial Day grew out of the Civil War experience. As deaths increased from 1861 to the end of the war those killed in action were recovered, buried, and memorialized through the service member’s unit, his comrades, his family, his home town, or his home state. There was no army-wide system for accurate identification of the remains, next of kin notification, or burial. For years after the war the bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers were reinterred by their family to family or local cemeteries; or, after 1867, to the new national cemeteries. Today there are 147 United States National Cemeteries maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs; 14 cemeteries associated with historic sites or battlefields main