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Margaret Berres and Tom Ludka are fighting to change the "next-of-kin" rule but what also needs to be change is the government not issuing a U.S. servicemen's marker if a "regular" marker is already present.
It makes no sense that if a family has an upright marker as seen below with a soldier's name on it that it should disqualify a veteran from receiving his/her U.S. Government grave marker.
This rule even applies to those veterans KILLED IN ACTION.
John Savage was mortally wounded on a battlefield far from his Milwaukee home 150 years ago this month.
When his body was brought back to Wisconsin, it was buried at Forest Home Cemetery without a headstone.
Many families couldn't even bring their loved ones back to their local cemetery when they fell on distant battlegrounds or succumbed to illnesses and wounds in hospitals.
But Savage, the son of the president of what was then Carroll College, came home to Milwaukee. Though no stone marks his final resting place, Forest Home Cemetery officials know exactly where he's buried: in Section 32 next to a large oak tree that could very well have been a sapling when his bereft family attended his funeral a week after he died from his injuries on the Fourth of July 1864.
Local historians Tom Ludka and Margaret Berres didn't think it was right that Savage and other Civil War heroes should be buried unnoticed and forgotten. For years they have researched Milwaukee-area cemetery records and filled out paperwork to get free headstones the U.S. government promises to all veterans. They have helped raise money for the cemetery headstone placement fees, which usually cost a couple of hundred dollars.
So Ludka and Berres were surprised last year when their routine requests for Savage and another Civil War veteran buried at Forest Home, William Brown, were turned down because of a bureaucratic loophole. Until recently, a cemetery official or veterans service officer could sign the paperwork for a veteran's free headstone.
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Chicago's Mt. Greenwood Cemetery - 2900 West 111th Street - (773) 233-0136
Chicago's Mt. Greenwood Cemetery has been a strong advocate for ordering free grave markers for many U.S. veterans buried at their historical cemetery with unmarked graves. The personnel at Mt. Greenwood Cemetery have ordered and received many grave markers for their Civil War Veterans and other U.S. veterans. Such an example can be seen in the below image.
Mt. Greenwood Cemetery is the resting place for many U.S. veterans, police officers and firefighters some of whom were killed in the line of duty and many other notable citizens.
Mt. Greenwood Cemetery also offers a discount to police/fire and their family. Their tree filled historical cemetery is one of the most beautiful cemeteries in Chicago.
