I live in Tacoma, WA. and am researching mainly my own ancestral lines. My father started this research in 1995 to 2005 when he passed. I picked up his work around 2015 and have grown many of the branches of my tree extensively. My family roots are centered around the Puget Sound Region (Everett to Olympia), WA. In addition my family has a strong concentration around Perham, MN, Eau Claire, WI and Pittsburgh, PA. My mother is from England and I am just beginning to research that ancestral line.

I am a teacher so I get a bunch of work done in the summer, but do find time during the school year to do a little research. If you need a picture from the Puget Sound region I am happy to try and get that for you. Please have the Cemetery Name and the Section, Lot / Grave location for me to help in my finding it. Let me know if you know if there is a headstone or not.

In the summer of 2025 I traveled to eastern France and the St. Mihiel American Military Cemetery to visit the burial location of a 1st Cousin 2x Removed who died of his wounds he received in action during the Saint Mihiel Offensive of Sept 12 - 16, 1918. My cousin died on Sept 14 1918. I have had a request for a picture of his grave site on his memorial page here for over 5 years. I chose last summer to visit his burial site. nine months prior to my leaving I then saw on the cemetery page here over 900 other requests for pictures. I then created a spreadsheet of everyone buried in the cemetery and went through every memorial page from that cemetery and made my list of over 2800 memorial ages that needed pictures. This cemetery is dedicated to only WW1 service members and some civilians are buried.

Next as I was planning my trip back to Paris I found that the Aisne-Marne American Military Cemetery, also dedicated to service members who died during WW1, was along my route. This cemetery had over half of the memorial pages that did not have pictures of the burial site and memorial crosses. I decided to spend a couple more days there taking the pictures of around 1600 service members burial sites.

The thank you messages I received for these pictures was incredibly heart warming and the sharing of their loved ones members stories touched me greatly. What started as simply my desire to visit and get a picture of my cousin's burial site has become a passion to honor those who died in service to our country and to France in WW1. Talking to the Superintendent of the Saint Mihiel Cemetery he said that at most they would only get 30 family members of those buried at there that would visit each year. This makes sense as it is 200 miles east of Paris. I am trying to get information on how my cousin was wounded in battle and died at a Field Hospital in Toul, France. The WW1 generation is now all gone and any of their children would most likely also have past. It falls now to the 2nd and 3rd generations of these service members to carry on their stories.

While I hold strong personal views about how horrific, wasteful and tragic any war is, I hold great reverence for our service members who selflessly serve our citizens and those of other countries around the world. For that I thank all our service members past and present for the service they gave and continue to give.

My passion now sparked for our WW1 service members I will travel back to France in the summer of 2026 and have planned to take the pictures of over 7000 burial sites of our WW1 service members. I hold the words of Gen. John Pershing honoring the WW1 service members who died close to my heart. Lets all strive to be sure we can live these words.

~Time will not dim the glory of their deeds~