She searched for a WWI gravesite photo. Now she connects thousands to soldiers who died | Opinion
It started with a search for her grandfather’s cousin. Lynn Goralski knew that this cousin, Albert Lantz, died in France during WWI. She also knew he was buried with hundreds of U.S. soldiers who all fell in the same battle, a victory for the war’s allied powers that came at the cost of thousands of lives.
In 2021, Goralski found an entry for Lantz’s final resting place in the St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial on a website popular with genealogists: findagrave.com. But there was no photograph of his headstone. She went through the website’s process of asking a volunteer take a photo, and waited. No one took up her request.
Eventually, she saw that more than 900 graves had unfulfilled requests for photos, and that only about 44% of all the burial sites had photos on the website.
That didn’t sit right with Goralski, from Tacoma. A photo of a headstone or grave marker can be meaningful for family.
“You have a connection to where they are buried by having a picture,” Goralski said. “I thought, I have the ability to be there, so why don’t I set it up so I can take those pictures?”
This June, Goralski set out to see Lantz’s grave in person. She also planned to photograph more than 4,000 grave markers across two different cemeteries for U.S. soldiers and military personnel who died during WWI in France.
A sweeping view of countless marble crosses can bring home the magnitude of war. But so can a close up of a single headstone, with one person’s name etched in marble. Each individual life that ended in France was a person connected to a family.
“I feel a deep sense of gratitude for all service members past and present,” said Goralski, who is a teacher at Emerald Ridge High School in Puyallup. She flew to France the day after the school year ended and began her dayslong photography project.
Thousands died retaking a French village
As the summer of 1918 drew to a close, the U.S. military ramped up its involvement in what was then called the Great War. In mid-September, French and American units under the command of U.S. military brass launched an attack to take back the French village of Saint-Mihiel and surrounding villages.
The area was known as a salient, or a bulge in the battle lines. Under German control, it was preventing communications between outposts of the French military and threatening Paris with a German breakthrough in the front. In rain, wind and mud, hundreds of tanks pushed through trenches and crossed German lines with support from the U.S. Air Service and the planes of allies.
On Sept. 14, Albert Lantz, 25, died, according to records Goralski accessed.
In total, the U.S. saw 7,000 casualties as part of the hostilities. The majority of the 4,153 U.S. soldiers and personnel buried at the St. Mihiel American Cemetery and Memorial died in the battle. There, row after row of marble markers etched with service member’s names show the cost of reclaiming Saint-Mihiel.
Creating a record of grave markers
In June of this year, Goralski set about getting a photo of each grave site not yet documented on the Find a Grave website, in a way creating a memorial to the memorial. She estimates she worked about seven hours a day, taking only short breaks for water, through a heatwave that baked the region. Ultimately, she said, she took photos of 2,322 grave sites.
Next, she visited another WWI cemetery, the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, and photographed another 1,688 grave sites.
Goralski doesn’t have a personal connection to the second cemetery, but she planned to go there after seeing that it was also missing photographs for nearly half of its graves. She continued her project there before going to Paris.
In total, she says she took 4,010 photos of grave sites. She estimates the task of individually uploading them to Find a Grave will take months. Once she does, she’ll have completed a map from each headstone to the service member’s entry on the Find a Grave website, which often links to entries for other family members.
Soldiers with no descendants
To Goralski, Lantz is her first cousin twice removed. While that might sound like a tenuous connection, Goralski said she’s moved by the fact that so many of the fallen soldiers were young, often with no children of their own.
That means many of the more than 100,000 U.S. service members who died during the war had no direct descendants. Even graves for those who did have children would now receive few visits, as those offspring would by now be in their 80s or 90s, if still alive. Goralski said the St. Mihiel cemetery receives about 30 visits a year from family members.
Battle wounds weren’t the only cause of death for those buried in the cemeteries, which are both exclusively for U.S. soldiers and military personnel. Further deaths came from the influenza pandemic, in which a virulent wave of the virus killed young people in France and throughout the world. Accidents also took lives.
Goralski counted more than 100 soldiers who enlisted in Washington buried in the cemeteries. Two notable locals include Herman Uddenberg of Gig Harbor, a scion of a pioneer family that ran grocery stores, who died in an accident, and University of Washington crew coxswain Walter C. Dunbar, who died of illness.
For Goralski’s visit this summer, cemetery staff placed flowers and two small flags, one French and one American, under Lantz’s grave marker. They rubbed sand from Omaha Beach into the etching of Lantz’s name, making it more legible in a photograph. She said Omaha Beach is considered an appropriate source of sand because the U.S. also fought alongside France there, albeit in World War II.
Now with a photo of the final resting place of her grandfather’s cousin, and more than 4,000 other photos, Goralski is back home in Tacoma, where she continues to study genealogy and history.
“There are just so many fascinating stories,” she said.
This story was originally published July 30, 2025 at 7:00 AM with the headline "She searched for a WWI gravesite photo. Now she connects thousands to soldiers who died | Opinion."