UCF group documents soldiers who died in France
World War I vets with ties to Florida focus of project
A trip to two cemeteries in northeast France to document the lives of Americans who died during World War I was a memorable opportunity for a group of University of Central Florida employees and students.
Their work, which is scheduled to go live this fall, will allow visitors at two cemeteries to scan headstones with their smartphones and learn about the people buried beneath them, focusing on the stories of 15 people with ties to Florida. The project coincides with the war’s centennial and the group hopes to make the stories of people who died more personal to visitors.
More than 116,000 Americans died during the war, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But it’s often overshadowed by World War II, during which an estimated 416,800 U.S. troops were killed, and other events in American memory.
“The people there are not forgotten by the French, but it
almost seems like they’re forgotten by Americans,” said Walter Napier, an Army veteran who is now a graduate student at UCF.
The group will add the biographies of the featured veterans to an app, where people can read their stories and see where they’re buried at the Aisne-Marne and Meuse-Argonne cemeteries, where more than 16,000 Americans are buried. The participants also creating a short video that K-12 teachers can use.
The project is funded by the National Cemetery Administration, which has given about $582,000 to the Veterans Legacy Program over two years. Their work has also included recording the lives of 15 African-American veterans buried at St. Augustine National Cemetery and working on materials about the Spanish-American and Seminole wars. And last year, about 100 UCF students wrote biographies for 120 veterans at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, where nearly 154,000 veterans and their spouses have been buried since 1988.
Chronicling the stories of the Americans buried in France was part of a research methods class for undergraduates at UCF, said Amelia Lyons, an associate professor in the history department at UCF. The students used publicly available documents such as birth certificates, service cards, Census data, marriage licenses and draft cards to research veterans, as well as yearbooks, websites like ancestry.com and newspaper clippings.
Lyons, who also teaches an undergraduate course about World War I, said she usually devotes about one class period to the role of the U.S. in the war. But after her trip to the American cemeteries in France, she’ll spend more time.
“I know it’s going to change the way I teach my class,” she said.
The UCF group worked long hours to help ensure the Florida veterans will be remembered: Over the course of nine days in midJuly, they covered about 64 miles on foot and climbed the equivalent of 400 flights of stairs.
There were fun moments, too. Some of the group members were in Paris when France won the World Cup. The city came to a halt as the clock wound down, with trains even halting until after the game ended.
And parts of the trip were particularly meaningful for the veterans in the group. For Jim Stoddard, an intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps between 2003 and 2013 who is now pursuing a master’s degree from UCF, visiting the site of the Battle of Belleau Wood, an important part of Marine history, was a “bucket list” item. He was able to drink from the famous “Devil Dog” fountain there, a tradition for Marines.
The experience, Napier said, was “life-changing.”