Nobody Deserves to Be Forgotten

Photo courtesy of Honoring our Legacy

Happy New Year! We start the new year looking forward but it’s also important to look back.

A powerful new chapter in remembrance has begun.

The Fields of Honor Foundation has officially launched its newly redesigned Fields of Honor Virtual Memorial, bringing together more than 15 years of dedication, research, and remembrance into one modern, accessible space.

What began in 2008 with the story of a single American soldier has grown into a living memorial honoring more than 45,000 U.S. service members who gave their lives in Europe during World War II. This new platform unites the former Fields of Honor database with The Faces of Margraten, ensuring that every name is paired, whenever possible, with a face, a story, and a legacy.

The revamped memorial allows stories to be enriched with photographs, documents, and soon audio and video. Related soldiers are thoughtfully connected, and information is easier than ever to explore, share, and download, whether you’re researching one individual or studying history at a broader scale.

The design looks to the future while honoring the past, using familiar colors inspired by the green fields of honor, the red, white, and blue of the American flag, and the marble crosses and Stars of David that mark these sacred resting places.

This achievement would not have been possible without the dedication of volunteers, partners, and nearly 400 donors, many of them relatives of the fallen or adopters of graves, whose generosity made the new memorial possible. The cemeteries themselves continue to be lovingly maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

If you believe remembrance matters and that history should never be reduced to numbers, take time to explore the new memorial and the stories it preserves.

Visit the new Fields of Honor Virtual Memorial:
https://fieldsofhonor.com/memorial/

Because remembrance is not just about the past; it’s a promise to the future.

Reuniting the Lost and Found

A few weeks ago I blogged about the very worthy Field of Honor database project in the Netherlands that memorializes fallen World War 2 soldiers. Strangely, as I was writing that article, I was contacted by an Ancestry.com member who I first connected with last spring about her DNA.

One of her parents was adopted and she was trying to see if we were related as I had placed information from the same geographical area she was researching on my Ancestry.com tree for the same surnamed individual. There were other coincidences – they had the same occupation, religion, place where they immigrated from and where they immigrated to about the same time (early 1900’s). We were thinking they were related but after comparing our DNA results, they weren’t blood relations.

The Ancestry member had received an email from another member who was contacted by someone in the Netherlands who found World War 2 dog tags using a metal detector and wanted to send them to family. I was contacted since we had the same surname – Koss – as the found tags who once belonged to Joseph E. Koss who died in 1944 in Holland.

I reached out to the memorial owner at Findagrave.com but he was not a relative. If you are a family member of a Joseph Koss please email me (see contact me page) and I will happily connect you so you can get the tags.

I’ve blogged in the past about scammers and I’ve read about fake dog tags being sold in Viet Nam but this does not smell like a scam to me but to keep my readers safe – I’ll play middleman for you. Using a metal detector and finding a lost object is typical in my world as that’s one of my husband’s hobbies and he has found and returned lost articles for people for years.

Funny how I’ve been contacted by folks living in the Netherlands twice in the past few weeks – maybe that’s where I should go visit next!