Penn Township resident seeks volunteers to create county database of veteran graves

Penn Township resident Bill Bray plans to spend the bulk of his free time this year walking through cemeteries.

An Army veteran who served from 1984 to 1993, Bray is looking for volunteers to help him survey all 291 of Westmoreland County’s cemeteries to document every military grave.

The county Veterans Affairs and Services office has a list of 38,900 deceased veterans. But Director Matt Zamosky suspects there are gaps in the county database.

“The information that we have is likely not complete, because there was nothing that compelled funeral homes or cemeteries to give us that information,” Zamosky said, noting funeral homes and cemeteries were only required in the last decade to report veteran deaths to the county.

“Or if a veteran had passed away somewhere else and was interred in Westmoreland County,” he said, “that information didn’t always get passed on.”

Bray aims to assemble a team of volunteers to walk through each Westmoreland County cemetery and identify the graves belonging to veterans. Volunteers will photograph each grave and enter pertinent identification information into a spreadsheet.

“The database that we create would be given to the local (American) Legions, VFWs and AMVETS so they would know where to put flags out for Memorial Day and Veterans Day,” he said.

Tall task ahead

Though Bray hopes to complete the database by Memorial Day 2026, Zamosky suspects it may take longer.

“We’re geographically a large county, and we also have the second highest veteran population in Western Pennsylvania,” he said. “Those two things make it … a larger project than it might be in another county.”

Veterans comprised about 7.5% of Westmoreland County’s population of 354,600 in 2020, according to U.S. Census data. Statewide, veterans made up nearly 6% of the population in 2023.

Bray knows firsthand veterans’ graves are not always well maintained. The Army veteran, who served from 1984 to 1993, has replaced more than 75 headstones at cemeteries in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio for World War I, Civil War and Spanish-American War soldiers.

He also led the charge to restore the Brush Creek Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church Cemetery in North Huntingdon.

That’s why Bray also wants to verify each veteran’s grave is accompanied by the flag that corresponds to the time period they served.

“(I want) to make sure that all veterans that are buried in the county are recognized and known,” Bray said. “It would actually help some family members know where their ancestors or family members are buried.”

Project grabs attention of commissioners

Leaning on more than a decade of experience documenting grave sites in the region on the Find a Grave website, Franny Petras is helping Bray sort the county’s list of deceased veterans by cemetery.

“It’s important to remember the veterans who served and gave their lives, some of them, and those who suffered emotional issues after serving,” said Petras, vice president of the Baltzer Meyer Historical Society in Hempfield.

“These people who gave up their lives and who served our country need to be recognized.”

Bray’s project caught the attention of the Westmoreland County commissioners, Zamosky said.

“For the commissioners to be supportive of it,” Bray said, “I’m thrilled and excited.”

One of five Veterans Affairs and Services employees, Zamosky said the county would not be able to tackle this project without help.

“We don’t have the resources to go out and do this ourselves,” he said. “Engaging the community to do it is a way to help honor those veterans from Westmoreland County to ensure that their relatives — if they’re doing genealogy research — are able to find them.”