Cemetery Records Of Yellowstone County Montana PDF Download

This book is about the creation of a United States national cemetery in Laurel, Yellowstone County, Montana. This book provides a visual and textual history from 2007 to 2014 of how the ten-acre Yellowstone National Cemetery began. The book also traces the beginnings of the US national cemetery system from America's civil war to present.Yellowstone National Cemetery didn't start as a national cemetery, but rather a county veterans cemetery: designed, built, and operated by the people of Yellowstone County, Montana, to US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) national specifications and standards. A coalition of Yellowstone County, Montana, veterans, civic leaders, and Montana's congressional delegation then successfully petitioned the VA to designate the cemetery a US national cemetery. This small number of dedicated Montana people arguably affected VA policy on creating national cemeteries in largely rural areas of America.Yellowstone National Cemetery is the first operational cemetery from the VA's Rural Veterans Burial Initiative: a national plan to create eight smaller-in-scale national cemeteries in largely rural areas in America: mostly in the American west. Seeing Yellowstone National Cemetery now, without understanding its genesis, leaves a person with the final chapter to a story with many paths and struggles. As with westward moving pioneers of early Montana, the long and tough ten-year journey to create the cemetery taxed the strongest of wills.Beginning 2008 the author photographed a tract of prairie land one mile north of Laurel, Montana: the land eventually became the veterans cemetery for Yellowstone County. Those early photographs planted the idea for the book. Many photos show what was there before and now. The photographs also show people and their work to enhance, honor, and dignify the cemetery. Montana state government had built three state veterans cemeteries: none close to Yellowstone County. Black Hills National Cemetery, Sturgis, South Dakota, the nearest national cemetery open for burials, was almost 300 miles east of Yellowstone County and largely out-of-reach for Montana's veterans.