In time for Memorial Day weekend this year, the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) has expanded its online memorialization platform to include 27 Department of Defense-managed cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery.
The addition of these cemeteries adds more than 300,000 individual interactive Veteran pages to the more than 4.5 million pages already contained within Veterans Legacy Memorial (VLM).
Also new is a simpler and faster search for users to find their Veterans, and a new feature that allows VLM visitors to add Personal Achievements to a Veteran’s page in addition to Military Achievements. Personal Achievements celebrate meaningful moments, such as graduating from high school or college, getting married, starting a family, retiring, etc.
“These new improvements to VLM are a direct result of feedback from family members and the public,” said Danny Devine, executive director of NCA’s Office of Engagement and Memorial Innovation, the office that manages VLM. “We’ll continue to improve the VLM Customer Experience to make the site more user friendly and the content submission process easier.”
Veteran pages are populated with military service and cemetery information. This publicly available information is gathered from VA records and includes service branch with logo, dates of birth and death, rank, war period, decorations, emblem of belief and cemetery details (address and phone, clickable map, gravesite and interment date).
Interactive features allow family, friends and the public to submit Tributes (comments), images, biographical information and historical documents; create their Veteran’s military service and personal achievements timeline; and generate a Word Cloud that describes their Veteran. The site also allows visitors to share Veteran profile pages by email and post them to social media, and users can “Follow a Veteran” to receive email alerts when new content is added to that Veteran’s page. To date, nearly 60,000 items have been posted to Veteran pages. All submitted user content is reviewed by VLM moderators before being posted to Veteran pages to ensure it conforms to the VLM User Policy and appropriately honors Veterans.
VLM customer support is available for user questions Monday to Friday (excluding federal holidays) from 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Central Time at vlm@va.gov or 1-866-245-1490.
Find and contribute to your Veterans’ legacies today at www.va.gov/remember.
