08/10/2026
This is a wonderful story and a powerful testament to the importance of preserving our county records for generations to come.
Sometimes the most important work we do isn't glamorous — it's the quiet act of keeping records safe, year after year, decade after decade, so that they're there when someone desperately needs them.
Recently, a VA Office in Minnesota reached out to Mitchell County Veterans Affairs Office with an unusual request: they were looking for the military discharge record of a man born in 1888. His ashes had been sitting on a shelf in a funeral home since 1974, over fifty years, because without proof of his military service, there was no way to secure him a VA burial plot and headstone.
Our Veterans Affairs Office turned to the Mitchell County Recorder's Office for help. We located the document: a half page record, preserved in our books for over a century, and it turned out to be the missing piece. With it, the funeral home was finally able to move forward and give this man the honorable burial he was entitled to as a veteran.
Without that record sitting safely in our archives, he may have remained on that shelf indefinitely.
This is a reminder that the work of the VA office doesn't end when a veteran's service ends, and it doesn't end when their life ends, either. VA offices are often thought of as a resource for benefits, claims, and support while a veteran is alive: helping them and their families navigate compensation, pensions, healthcare, and countless other services they've earned. But that responsibility doesn't stop there. They're also there in death: making sure a veteran's service is documented, honored, and recognized, even decades later, even when almost everyone who knew them is gone.
And behind that effort is another office entirely: the Recorder's Office, quietly preserving the records that make moments like this possible. This is why what we do matters. Record-keeping isn't just paperwork, it's a promise. A promise that even decades later, no one gets forgotten, and every veteran's service is honored in the end, in life and in death.
For veteran assistance contact your local Veterans Affairs Office. For records assistance contact your County Recorder's Office.
