Just after the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 2016, lifelong history buff Don Milne, began a personal passion project where everyday he wrote a story about one of the US World War II fallen on the 100th anniversary of their birthday. He did this each day on his lunch break and ended up with more than 1,300 stories saved in his WW2Fallen100 blog. These stories had been read more than 1 million times, but he was planning to wrap things up on September 2, 2020. The 75th anniversary of the end of WWII would be a nice date to end this one- man tribute to the fallen. His readers wanted him to keep going. However, at one story a day it would take more than 1,100 years to write a story of everyone of the 421,000+ US WWII fallen. To write more stories, he was going to need help.

In the fall of 2019, after a 29 year career at Zions Bank, Milne’s position at the bank was eliminated. He found himself with the choice of finding a new job in the financial services field, or taking a leap of faith to set up a project to finish what he started - actually tell the stories of ALL the 421,000+ US WWII fallen. With the part-time help of his daughter Tatiana Fallon, Milne created the nonprofit initiative Stories Behind the Stars. Its mission was simple - 1) get a story for everyone of the US WWII fallen, and 2) develop a smartphone app so anyone could read those stories at any gravestone or memorial.

To make this happen, he was going to need a list of the fallen and get a whole bunch of help from others to write the stories.

Readers may be surprised to learn that there is no accurate, official national list of the US WWII fallen names. There isn’t even an accurate official count. Milne decided to start with his then home state of Utah. If he could do all the names from one state, that would prove it could be done for any state.

To do all the names from Utah, he had to get the Utah list of fallen, and since no such list existed, he had to create it. Milne was able to get a good start with a list provided by Roy Hemmat of HonorStates.org. HonorStates.org is a project to create a database of US military fallen from World War I through the Vietnam War. He then compared that to the National Archives and Records Administration’s Army and Navy WWII Honor Rolls. Last of all, he added names from the 3 February 1946 issue of the Deseret News that attempted to list all the Utah WWII fallen. In the end, he ended up with a spreadsheet with 2,100 names.

Milne then created training documents and videos showing people how easy it was to research and write obituary length stories. By the summer he was ready to find volunteers to help. Local news stories in the Provo Daily Herald, the Ogden Standard Examiner, KSL.com, Utah Public Radio, and the Extreme Genes podcast, reached the help he needed. Eventually he attracted 126 volunteers -- most were from Utah, but they also came from 27 other states and even Canada. These volunteers ranged in age from teens to pushing ninety. Many had family who served in World War II, sometimes not coming home. Many have served in the military themselves. Some had decades of genealogical experience. Others were rookies but quick learners.

Utah based Ancestry.com pitched in by granting Stories Behind the Stars with institutional status like a library. This provided a way for volunteers to access key research sites for free. Ancestry’s Fold3 division, especially created to honor those who served in the military, stepped up to serve as the common database to hold all these stories in online memorials, free to access by anyone.

Some of the 126 volunteers contributed one or two stories and moved on. Others did a dozen stories, or two dozen, or even more - up to 200+! It would take one person nearly three years of 8 hour workdays to research and write all of these stories. The Utah pilot project volunteers did it in six months.

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Two years later, the Find A Grave smartphone app can now be used to read these stories at any gravesite or memorial, such as the new Utah Veterans Memorial in West Valley City, Utah. Find out more here.

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One Utah family lost four sons. Listen to the Stories Behind the Stars podcast of the Borgstrom brothers.

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