The urns sat on shelves, in basements, in storage units and apartment buildings across Iowa for years, sometimes decades. Some were never picked up from the funeral homes that cremated them. Others were found abandoned, their names and service records slowly fading from memory. On Saturday, sixteen of them will finally be carried to the ground at the Iowa Veterans Cemetery in Van Meter, with full military honors, in front of anyone who wants to come.
The nonprofit behind the ceremony is called The Final Salute, and Saturday's service will be its eighth. It is also a milestone: with these burials, the group will have laid to rest its 100th veteran or military spouse.
The day begins at Lutheran Church of Hope in Waukee, where visitation opens at 9:30 a.m. A memorial service follows at 11 a.m., then a procession will make the drive west to the cemetery, where burial is scheduled to begin around 12:45 p.m. The sixteen include nine Army veterans, three from the Navy, three Marines and one from the Air Force.
What makes this year unusual is how the list grew. For a long stretch, organizers had only five names. Then a Des Moines funeral home reached out and asked for help identifying dozens of unclaimed cremated remains in its possession. It turned over about 72 urns. As volunteers began working through them, checking names against military records, they found veteran after veteran among the unclaimed.
"We sat at five for a long time," founder Lanae Strovers told KCCI. "We had a funeral home here in Des Moines that reached out to us and said, hey, we want you to help us with our urns, and they turned in about 72 to us. And, as we have started going through those, we found quite a few veterans."
The story of how those urns got there is, in a sense, the story of the whole effort. Strovers is a funeral director at Hamilton's Funeral Home in Des Moines, and she did not come to this work through any military connection. She has no family ties to service. What moved her was a discovery: that unclaimed veterans were not a rare, tucked-away problem but a widespread one, scattered in places no one would think to look.
"We realized that urns weren't just in the basements of funeral homes," she told Military.com. "They were in apartment buildings, storage units that had been abandoned, on the side of the road … all different places."
The Final Salute was founded in 2018. Strovers and the volunteers around her began the slow, unglamorous work of locating unclaimed remains, researching the people behind them, and finding a place where they could be buried with the dignity their service earned. That place turned out to be the Iowa Veterans Cemetery in Van Meter.
The services have grown steadily. In 2024, The Final Salute laid to rest 20 veterans and five spouses at a ceremony at West Des Moines Christian Church — its largest to that point. Among the dead that year was a Civil War soldier, and the group noted that the collective years of being forgotten among those being honored added up to 877. Rich Shipley of the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonprofit that attends veterans' funerals, spoke at that service.
"You're about to hear a collective of 877 years of being forgotten; 877 years of being unclaimed without anyone to call them family," Shipley said. "And 877 years away for the honors that they rightfully deserve. But today, here in Iowa, we change that."
A year later, in October 2025, the group buried thirteen veterans and one military spouse, again at Lutheran Church of Hope in Waukee, with hundreds lining up to pay tribute. Organizers make a point of telling each person's story as fully as researchers can reconstruct it — where they served, when they were born, what could be learned about the life they lived before it went unclaimed.
"They lived a whole life. It's not just about being born and dying," Strovers said. "You don't go to any other funeral and not hear about the whole person. So, we feel very strongly about trying to tell the whole story."
Saturday's ceremony will follow that same pattern, and it will be a community production in the most literal sense. The urns were made by a high school shop class at Prairie City-Monroe. A group of Boy Scouts will lead the Pledge of Allegiance. People are flying in from six different states to attend.
"We try and involve as many people in the public as possible," Strovers said. "It's really grown and the community has really come together for it. So, it's a very humbling day, but it's also a great day for just all who want to get together and really show their honor and respect to this community."
The group's motto is simple: No One is Forgotten, Veterans and Civilians Alike. For the families who never came, or who no longer exist, the public becomes the family instead. Anyone is welcome at the church, along the procession route, or at the graveside. There is no ticket, no invitation, no connection required — only the willingness to stand for a few minutes on behalf of someone who served and was, for a while, left behind.
For Strovers, the reason is not complicated. Asked why she does it, she has given the same answer for years: "It's the right thing to do."