It all began with 1st Class Petty Officer Rodger C. Butts, a Black Navy cook from Los Angeles who died in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, while serving on the USS Oklahoma.
Butts was 47 when his ship was sunk by Japanese aircraft killing him and 428 of his fellow sailors.
Taking the time to discover Butts’ story put Laura Hanaford from San Clemente on a passionate journey in 2021 to help an organization known as Stories Behind the Stars (SBTS), which has a goal to memorialize all 421,000 American service members who died during World War II.
The biographies are placed on two websites: Together We Served, which includes a Roll of Honor site at Arlington National Cemetery, where about 20,000 stories can be found, and Fold3, which Ancestry.com runs.
Once stories are completed, they are linked to Findagrave.com, an app and website where users can search names on graves at military cemeteries and find some of the completed stories. In the future, users will be able to scan the graves directly.
The group’s hundreds of volunteers have completed projects on D-Day, Utah Beach, Pearl Harbor, Arlington National Cemetery, HMT Rohna, 100th Bomb Group (the Bloody Hundredth) and the SS Leopoldville. Volunteers come from all 50 states and a dozen countries worldwide.
Don Milne, a banker and history buff now living in Kentucky, came up with the idea for the project in 2016 while watching a program where Pearl Harbor survivors were interviewed on the attack’s 75th anniversary.
“They were telling people, ‘We’re not the real heroes, the real heroes are the guys who didn’t make it back,’” he said. “So, I was thinking the real heroes you never hear about because they died.”
Milne saw that Ancestry.com collected military records and thought, “Wouldn’t it be a cool project if every day on my lunch break, I wrote the story of someone who never got to be 100 years old because they died in the war?”
He started posting stories on Facebook and other social media, and after a year, they had 1.5 million views. Eventually, more volunteers wrote. But the small crew wasn’t enough, and Bob Fuerst, now the state volunteer in Alabama, suggested Milne make it a national effort.
He contacted Ancestry.com, which operates Fold3, and it agreed to host the stories outside of its paywall for free public access. They also offered to create the app. Milne said interest in creating stories has blossomed, and he expects to hit 70,000 by the end of May.
While some volunteers might write a story or two, he said, about half have written over 1,000 stories.
“It’s super important to have people like Laura help us with this program,” he said. “If we had 1,000 people like her, we’d already have 120,000 names.” The group completed biographies for all service members from Utah who died during World War II in 2021, followed by all such service members from Nevada in 2024, and all those from Alabama this year.”
And, he said, despite getting fulfillment from her work, what she and others are doing will have a lasting effect for decades to come.
“We have generations now that don’t know anybody who was in World War II,” he said. ” And lot of the younger generation has become attached to this cellphone at the end of their hand and wouldn’t it be great when they go to a cemetery like Arlington, they have the ability to look at any grave, pull out their phone look at any person’s name and read that story?”
In her research on Butts, Hanaford – now in her fourth year of writing with 131 stories complete – learned that Butts and his wife owned a home on E. 112th Street in Los Angeles. She also found that his youngest brother also served in World War II, stayed in the Army through Korea and Vietnam, and is now buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
While she began with Pearl Harbor, she’s also worked on the Arlington National Cemetery project, which, she said, improved the cemetery’s database on World War II fallen.
Next, she found the 14-page Gold Star Edition, a special section of the then-Santa Ana Register created in 1945. It listed the names and showed photos of 366 of Orange County’s fallen. She has done 55 names from that edition. Milne said that, while there are no official counts, California had around 26,000 fallen.
What compels Hanaford, 66, a retired speech pathologist who estimates she spends about eight to 10 hours researching and writing each biography, is her desire to honor that generation. She said she first learned of the opportunity when she read about Murrieta resident Robert (Red) Mulvanny, a Navy veteran who has written 2,000 stories.
Mulvanny said he’s happy his work inspired Hanaford and that he believes hundreds of thousands of heroes have been overlooked.
“To me, every one of those who died deserves to have their story told,” he said. “It pisses me off that we’re not the patriotic, loyal Americans they were 70 years ago. We take so much for granted now.”
“It inspires me that she is willing to take time out of her schedule and do this,” he continued. “If she can get two more, that’s value added.”
Hanaford is also her father’s daughter. The Navy World War II veteran always reminded the family of the service of those who died.
“We always knew when it was VE Day (Victory in Europe) and VJ Day (Victory over Japan) and Pearl Harbor Day,” she said. “He survived the war and always felt guilty. He wanted to be sure no one forgot. I felt this was a way to honor him as well as all those people.”
So, because Hanaford had already exhausted the genealogy rabbit hole on her own family, she volunteered. Her goal, she said, is to always find a cool or unique fact on each person. She researches census reports, old newspaper databases, yearbooks and national archives.
In one case, she learned the guy she studied was in a harmonica quartet.
“I didn’t know that was a thing,” she said. “I like to find out not just how they died but how they lived and what they enjoyed. Back then, it is amazing to look at a smallish Midwestern town and realize they had two newspapers and how important they were to communities.”
Another tidbit she found was a story about a man in Northern California who wrote a letter to every soldier from his town.
“And, the paper talked about it and posted the military address so the community could also write them,” she said.
Some research yielded even richer details.
Such as the one on 1st Lt. Jack Weller Smith, a pilot with the 15th Army Air Force, who was killed in action on June 26, 1944, on a mission to destroy an Austrian oil refinery. The Brooklyn, New York, native was flying a B-24 bomber when it was heavily damaged by cannon fire.
According to Hanaford’s findings, seven of his crew bailed out, and Smith was preparing to jump when he noticed two stuck crew members. Instead of abandoning them, the 25-year-old tried to land the plane. But it crashed.
She said that using Smith’s middle name and finding information on a missing air crew report helped Hanaford uncover more details. Bombardier pilots and crews were among the heaviest losses in Europe. But in the States, there were also many deaths in training accidents.
Most of those who bailed out of the plane became POWs, she said, but a German Luftwaffe officer found the crashfield and spoke with Smith as he died.
“Smith gave a ring to the German and that ring was ultimately returned to the family after the war,” she said.
With each person, Hanaford said, she does her best to build out the story.
Her longest was a piece on Pfc. Aciano Avila, of San Juan Capistrano, who was killed on June 23, 1944, in the battle for Saipan Island. The 27-year-old was part of the Army’s 102nd Medical Battalion.
This was because Hanaford got more than 60 hits on him, and she found his great-nephew, with whom she emailed and Zoomed. Avila is buried in the San Juan Capistrano Mission cemetery.
“There are a lot of family trees because the Avila family is like a history of California, and history of San Juan Capistrano,” she said. “Aciano was an athlete, so there were 120 newspaper articles on him.”
She stores the sources in an Ancestry.com research tree and uploads newspaper articles to a gallery section. One nifty trick, she said, is that Ancestry.com automatically arranges facts like census records and draft cards in chronological order. However, some military records, like WWII casualty lists, are dated by a range like 1939-1946, which throws some of the chronology off.
Once she’s got all her research ready, she sets herself up at a desktop near her kitchen and begins. Her writing time varies from a story a week to two a month. Interruptions are when she and her husband travel or if she’s outside gardening.
Each story leaves a mark, and the process often becomes very emotional, she said.
For example, when she wrote about David Allen, a 22-year-old Marine who died May 16, 1945, on Okinawa, she was struck by an article that had been scanned into the Ancestry website. He is buried at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana and was from Costa Mesa.
“There was a letter he had written to his parents saying, ‘I know if my time comes, it will be my time,’” she recalled. “When you think of someone (that young) writing about their own mortality, that was really touching. I can’t imagine writing something like that at 21.”
If she finds one of her fallen was part of a plane crash, she’ll veer off her path of going down the Register’s list and do all the people who were part of the crash.
“It’s hard to pull myself away sometimes and probably a little frustrating for my husband,” she said. “But because he’s a Navy veteran, he can help figure out what all these initials mean, see a picture of a plan, and help identify it. It’s really interesting.”
Her research has led her to discover interesting facts, such as what contributed to the growth of Orange County and the surrounding Southern California area.
For example, she said, she was surprised how many people came to the area from Oklahoma after the Great Depression. She discovered that the city of Tustin had identified all 18 fallen during World War II and now has a street named after each.
To her, each story gives her more of a glimpse into an era long gone and fills her with tremendous respect for those who gave their all.
“I feel very humbled by what that generation did,” she said. “I’m proud of participating in this and have had contact with other amazing people doing the same thing.”
She said working on Butts’ biography also gave her insight into the challenges minorities faced in the services.
“The first time you see a Navy muster roll where they list the race, wherever it said ‘Negro,’ the position was cook,” she said. “It’s so documented, this restriction.”
But she was happy to bring his story full circle, including learning that he had been returned to his loved ones.
“His DNA was identified and he’s since been buried near family in Ohio,” she said. “They take all the bodies underwater and take bits of bones and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is still trying to make matches. They took DNA from a cousin and were able to identify remains.”
Originally, Milne had hoped to complete all the stories by Sept. 2, the 80th anniversary of Japan signing the surrender documents. Now, he said, realistically, it could be another five years. Hanaford is hopeful that others might find what she does inspirational, and more writers could be found. Among her ideas is recruiting a school or college class to help out.
But the project’s end is also bittersweet.
“I kinda don’t know what I’m going to do when the project is done,” she said, “because I enjoy doing it so much.”