Over the past 15 months a group of what started at a few dozen and now exceeds 1,400 people have written more than 13,000 stories of the US World War fallen. This includes:
All 2,105 WWII fallen from one state (Utah)
All 2,502 who died in Normandy on D-Day
More than 1,000 who died at Pearl Harbor (All 2,335 will be completed by this December 7)
The nonprofit initiative Stories Behind the Stars has a goal of completing the remaining 408,000 stories by September 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. To reach this goal we are going to need about 2,000 volunteers writing an average of one story a week. Of course some people do less, and some do more.
Thanks to the support of Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, we can provide free training and free access to research materials. If you can write a regular obituary, you have what it takes to write a story of a fallen hero. It takes less time to write a story than to watch a show on Netflix, and thanks to the upcoming smartphone app, anyone will be able to read the stories at the fallen’s gravesite or memorial.
If you are not a writer, there are other ways you can help. Arlington National Cemetery has given us their list of all the US WWII fallen buried there. We need help adding missing information to this database so we have a list our writers can start with. That will be our next project after Pearl Harbor. We could use volunteers to do internet searches to find what is missing.
Find out more at www.storiesbehindthestars.org or email don@storiesbehindthestars.org.
P.S. - Stories Behind the Stars has been in the news nearly 100 times including msn.com and an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum.
P.P.S. - Be sure to check out the increasingly popular podcast where we interview those who are telling the Stories Behind the Stars.