Not lost to history
College students take part in effort to record the stories of New Mexico veterans.
About 68,000 people are buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery — most of them veterans and some of them
spouses.
Their headstones tell their names, dates of birth and death, what branch of the military they served in and their rank.
Each burial, however, is the story of a life that threatens to be forgotten.
A coalition of local veterans, educators, media specialists and others hope to prevent that by capturing the stories of servicemen and women interred at the national cemetery through the Veterans Legacy Project. This 5-year-old initiative of the National Cemetery Administration engages college students in a project in which they research veterans’ histories, interview relatives, write about the veterans’ lives and create short videos.
Higher education partners in the program — in this case, Santa Fe Community College — also work with public school teachers in their communities to develop lesson plans based on the veterans’ stories.
“This will get a discussion going in New Mexico, and maybe nationally, to understand how important New Mexicans were to so many historical military events,” said Ken
Dettelbach, a Vietnam War veteran who helped spearhead the project several years ago.
It will provide a way “to tell history
through the eyes of the family members of those buried in the national cemetery,” he added.
College officials will recruit and train students to conduct and record interviews with family members.
Students participating in the bilingual program also will work with college staff to create an interactive website where visitors can learn more about the project, the veterans and the public school component.
Santa Fe Community College’s one-year contract with the National Cemetery Administration was finalized last week. It’s still unclear how many students will take part or which veterans they will choose to profile in the first semester of the program, said Steve Martinez, an assistant professor of history at the college. The project proposal calls for profiles on 15 veterans in the first year.
Martinez said the program will give students an opportunity to document the history of the Hispanic and Native American veterans who contributed to New Mexico’s lengthy and rich history of military service.
“We can pay tribute to a lot of those veterans who have been forgotten,” he said.
The University of Central Florida in Orlando is one of several schools around the country offering the program. Its website includes biographies of veterans with notes citing sources such as interviews, books, media accounts and historical documents, as well as photos and a mobile application for visitors who want to tour Florida’s national cemeteries.
The K-12 public school curriculum created for that program is called “Where the Cemetery Meets the Classroom.” Lesson plans cover an array of topics, including Florida’s Seminole War and the role of African Americans in the military.
Amelia Lyons, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, said she started a similar project about local veterans before applying to the National Cemetery Administration for support.
Students at the university have so far chronicled the lives of more than 200 veterans — before, during and after their years of service.
Besides helping students connect with U.S. history on a personal level as researchers, she said, the project “helps students understand what historians do on a nuts-and-bolts level: how to ask questions, how to finesse those questions and take primary and secondary sources and use them together to construct that narrative. It helps produce students who are critical thinkers.”
Dettelbach said the Santa Fe Community College program — which offers honorariums for students and teachers who participate — will help students learn about local veterans and improve their communication and presentation skills.
“The students will jump on this; the families [of veterans] will jump on this,” he said.
For those family members, he said, the legacy project can serve as “a catharsis to talk about relatives who were in the service or in a war.”