Veteran graves to get headstones

After having been buried for over 130 Black Hills winters in Custer’s city cemetery, Civil War veteran Joel Nelson Lillie is finally getting a headstone to mark his grave this spring. The grave stones for Lillie and nearly a dozen other U.S. military veterans buried in Custer are to be installed largely thanks to the efforts of American Legion member Glen Talley and Custer County Veterans Service Officer Todd Fish. The stones for three of the veteran graves, including Lillie’s, have already been delivered and will be set when the weather warms up this spring.
Talley, who took over as Legion Post 46’s graves registration officer several years ago,  said the effort really began about a decade ago. Charged with the responsibility of putting flags on all veteran graves on Memorial Day, Talley found that a number of those graves were not marked and many didn’t have flag holders.
“It got to the point where we didn’t know where the veterans’ graves were,” said Talley, so he launched a project to identify those graves. One high school girl even made the effort her senior project. The result of that study was to learn that as many as 13 graves, believed to be of veterans, had no stones at all. So about five years ago Talley began working on getting official veteran headstones for those graves from the Veterans Administration.
Of the 13 stoneless graves, two were believed to be of Civil War vets, one from the Spanish American War, two from WWI, five from WWII and two from Vietnam. Two others were uncertain as to the time of service.
As someone who loves doing genealogical research and with a background in criminal investigation, Talley is the perfect man for the job of digging up information on cold cases. He said during his investigations he made several trips to the state archives in Pierre and joined a website called Fold3, which specializes in veteran records dating all the way back to the Revolutionary War. When he came to the end of his resources he turned to Fish who was able to pursue channels Talley didn’t have access to.
“Todd has been the one who really pushed it over the edge,” said Talley, noting that Fish is able to make the official application to the VA’s Memorial Services at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia which cuts the stones.
Fish said when Talley turned the information over to him he first had to do a state-level search of records followed by a federal search with the National Personal Records Center. He said the government didn’t start keeping good records at the federal level until WWI and he notes getting the information can take a long time.
The pair’s work has uncovered some fascinating facts about veterans buried—and not buried—in the Custer Cemetery on the hill north of town. They discovered, for instance, that of the nearly 400 veterans buried there, 41 fought in the Civil War (with several fighting on the side of the Confederacy), 11 were in the Spanish American War, 84 served during WWI, 153 served in WWII, 45 fought in the Korean War, 28 served in Vietnam and four were Gulf War veterans. Another 15 are identified as veterans but not with any particular conflict and two veterans were involved in WWII, Korea and Vietnam.
Among the those who lie in previously unmarked graves on the hill, one was a transient whose body was found near Sylvan Lake after suffering a heart attack in 1967, and another was found to have served with both the Canadian and U.S. militaries in WWI. Talley said if he is unable to get a stone from the VA he might be able to get one from an organization in Canada which provides markers for Canadian vets.
Still another veteran, Edward J. Beaton, who has a grave plot in the Custer Cemetery is not even buried there. Talley said the man’s remains are actually buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery near San Francisco.
His name has been scratched from the list of 13 as was the name of another man who was identified as a veteran in cemetery records but never served a day.
Lillie, who was a Union soldier in the Civil War, died Nov. 24, 1889 when he fell from a load of hay near Four Mile breaking both arms and “sustaining serious internal injuries.” A note in an old issue of the Custer County Chronicle said Lillie had come to the area a short time before from Caliope (sic), Iowa and left behind a wife and son. (Calliope appears to have been the original county seat of Sioux County, Iowa, located southeast of Sioux Falls.)
Of the 11 remaining graves on the list of those needing stones, Talley said details of the men’s lives and service largely remain a mystery. He asked us to publish their names and dates of death (DOD) in hopes someone might have more information about them.
The five men are O.D. Moore, DOD 3/9/1905; Joseph Earl Moore, DOD 5/8/1931; John “Jack” Nellie, DOD 6/29/1967; Lawrence Brown, DOD 3/25/1915 and Daniel J. Brown, DOD 6/11/1928. Anyone who has information about these men is asked to email Talley at talley@gwtc.net.
The stones for Lillie and WWII veterans Theodore Gossen and Charles Z. Carpenter have been delivered and are being stored by Chamberlain-McColley’s Funeral Home as they await installation this spring. Fish and Talley said the funeral home has been extremely helpful in the project. They said the Custer County Commission has also been “very supportive” and in addition to paying for the setting of the three stones has offered to pay for other stones if they can’t be obtained from other agencies.
Talley says he believes there may be more veterans buried in Custer than are known right now, but because families handled the burial arrangements the graves are not marked as such.