FL Veteran Builds Movement To Clean Abandoned Gravestones

FORT MYERS, FL — It all started as a personal journey to connect with American history and bond with his daughter.

Trae Zipperer just wanted to travel the country with his daughter, sightseeing and visiting historical sites, cemeteries, battlefields, museums and national parks. Anything that had a little bit of history to it.

What came from that family trip was something he never imagined: a national movement to clean and repair all abandoned veterans’ gravestones in small community and church cemeteries across the country. He estimates that there are between 6 and 7 million such headstones that have been ignored for decades.

Through his initiative By Memorial Day, he hopes to mobilize enough volunteers to clean them all. (Watch Zipperer's video at the bottom of the story on how to safely clean a gravestone.)

A cross-country family vacation

The Fort Myers father embarked on that initial trip with his then pre-teen daughter and wife, touring historic places across the United States, about four years ago.

“I wanted her to see these places and experience them firsthand, instead of in a history book,” he said.

His daughter wasn’t impressed, though, and Zipperer brainstormed ways for her feel connected with the history before them.

“She wasn’t interested in the battlefields and other sites…My thing was how can I get her more interested in these sacred places. This is hallowed ground,” he said. “We went to Gettysburg. I walked out on the battlefield at sunset amazed while my daughter was in the hotel room. I began thinking about how can I reach her and get her interested in these places.”

Knowing that his family’s roots in America pre-date the Revolutionary War, the Bradenton native realized he must have some ancestors who fought in the Civil War or were involved in other pivotal moments in history. He’d never studied his genealogy before, though, so he didn’t know for sure. That's when he started doing his research.

Creating a family tree

“I had this idea that one of my grandfathers must have fought in the war…but I don’t know who my people are. I never had my family tree,” he said. “So, I set out to build my tree. I spent 40 days and 40 nights with about four hours of sleep every night. I had this sense of urgency I never experienced before.”

He even interviewed his grandparents, who were in their nineties at the time he started this personal project.

“History came alive when I talked to them,” he said. “Once they’re gone, you can’t ask them anymore, who are the faces in the photos?”

Surprisingly, Zipperer learned that he had 77 family members who fought during the Civil War, on both sides. He also discovered that he had “40 patriot grandfathers” who fought for America during the Revolutionary War.

“I think I broke a record. Most people have just three or four. And that’s just grandfathers. We’re not even getting into uncles, cousins and things like that,” he said. “My grandfathers fought the British to create America.”

After this, he set out on a different journey: finding the graves of these family members he had just learned about. Using FindaGrave.com, a website that documents the location of millions of graves across the country, he found where his ancestors were buried and began visiting them.

“It’s fascinating to go to these places and find your grandfather. It makes you appreciate more the cost of freedom and what it took to get here, because now it’s personal,” he said. “It was the most amazing adventure of my life to go to these cemeteries, to walk these church grounds and find these headstones. It’s powerful. These people are my DNA.”

In 2017, Zipperer traveled about 12,000 miles, going from cemetery to cemetery. While it was a powerful trip that connected him with the history of his family and country, he was also appalled by the state of some gravestones he saw.

“When you go to visit someone who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg and surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse and you see their gravestone crushed under a giant oak tree and you don’t even know how many years ago that happened, you can’t just walk away,” he said.

Some grave markers were covered in dirt and black algae, while others were sinking or leaning, he said. As he made his journey, he cleaned about 175 headstones of family members and other veterans.

When he got home, he couldn’t stop thinking about the gravestones he had seen. He knew there were even more veterans out there whose headstones were in disrepair and that weren’t being honored in death.

In October 2019, Zipperer, a U.S. Navy veteran himself, thought he could start a national movement to clean these gravestones by collecting donations for the needed supplies and encouraging volunteers to visit cemeteries in their communities to scrub these grave markers by Veterans Day that year.

“I was naïve. I thought if I just put it on Facebook, it would go viral,” he said. “I thought, ‘Everybody loves America, and everybody is patriotic. They won’t stand for this.’”

The launch of By Memorial Day

Though he didn’t immediately get the reach he had hoped for on social media, he traveled through 16 states cleaning gravestones. And last spring, he once again encouraged followers to clean veterans’ graves in their communities by Memorial Day 2020

“Then the pandemic happened,” he said, which slowed his movement.

Last spring, Zipperer also established the formal name for his initiative — By Memorial Day — and has been working ever since to spread the word and to clean headstones wherever he goes.

He’s still shocked by the appearance of the gravestones he encounters.

“Why are there headstones covered in black algae? That’s not right,” he said. “They’re leaning and so dirty you can’t read the name. Something is so wrong with that…American’s forgotten these veterans and it shows in our headstones.”

He stresses that these are not markers found in national cemeteries, where about 3.7 million veterans are buried.

“Those are not a problem. They have massive budgets from the federal government and the grounds are always pristine,” he said.

The real problem is the gravesites of veterans buried in smaller hometown cemeteries and forgotten. Their families were issued military headstones by the federal government.

“The government doesn’t even know how many they shipped out,” he said. “They’re scattered all over America. I’d guess there are between 6 and 7 million.”

Building a movement

Zipperer has been surprised by the bureaucracy he’s encountered when trying to clean these markers. Sometimes, it prevents him from cleaning these sites.

In Fort Myers, he was told by the city that only family members can give permission to clean veterans’ headstones and to obtain contact information for the families, he would need to submit an official records request, he said. He’s received similar responses from officials in other cities and counties, as well.

Still, he hasn’t given up. He’s even worked with the National Cemetery Administration to establish protocols for cleaning veterans’ gravestones. The guidelines adopted by the federal agency establish these grave markers as federal property, which makes it easier for Zipperer and others to clean them, since permission from families or local municipalities is no longer needed.

In the months leading up to Memorial Day 2021, he’s cleaned gravestones in counties throughout the state, including Manatee, Lee, Hendry and Glades.

“People have busy lives. They don’t think about veterans’ headstones,” he said. “It’s like I’m in a desert with a billboard and every once in a while, someone looks up at me.”

Though he’s connected with “a few thousand” volunteers across the country, that isn’t enough to get the job done, he said.

He launched a website, VeteranGraves.com, to make it easy for people to help. Volunteers can document veteran gravestones they find in their communities — creating an online record for each grave marker — and then pledge to clean them each year.

“It’s our duty as Americans and our duty as a sovereign nation to maintain the graves of those who fight for us,” Zipperer said. “Each one of these soldiers has a story. The idea is to clean (these headstones), honor them and show them respect as though they’re a national shrine.”

Learn how to properly clean veterans' headstones in the video below: