Military Grave Registrations, 1936-1952 Series 0465

These records include correspondence, reports, cemetery lists, field work sheets, and index cards for the state-wide veterans' graves registration project conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Sponsored by the American Legion and the Department of Archives and History, county-level workers located and registered the graves of veterans of wars through 1952 interred in Mississippi. Cemeteries in each county were surveyed and a field work sheet was prepared for each veteran's grave. The county workers then researched local records and newspapers and interviewed relatives to gather more information about each veteran. The work sheets were forwarded to the state project office in Jackson, where workers accessed records at the Department of Archives and History, the State Service Office (predecessor of the Veterans Affairs Commission), and other state and federal agencies to further round out the data, which was transcribed onto index cards. After the WPA project was completed, additional cards were added by the American Legion based on their participation in veterans' funerals. Images of project pages and cards were created by FamilySearch onsite at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2011, except for two folders of World War I correspondence that were scanned by MDAH staff in 2013. All images in this series are arranged alphabetically by folder description, though several cards and pages were misfiled. Adjacent folders may contain each other's records.