KIA Family Invitation Mailing Recap

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KIA Family Invitation Mailing Recap

Postby Jim Sheppard » Sun Jul 12, 2009 2:44 am

As you may know, we made a concerted effort to find as many family members and friends of our men killed in action and invite them to our Memorial Wreath Laying Service at this year's reunion.

I "e-mailed" a list of 162 family and friends. These e-mail addresses were gleaned from various Internet Memorial web sites.

35 of these "bounced...or...were no longer working. I got responses from 20 persons...several offering information on additional contacts...and received one new "snail mail" address for the mother of Dave Cardinal. That means 107 people chose not to respond to our invitation to attend the memorial service.

We also mailed 63 letters via the USPS to folks who gave us mailing addresses. As far as I know, none of these have been returned...which is a good argument for why we are pleading with these family members to give us a home address. I know of at least two of these folks who I begged that they give us a home address...as we might loose contact if all we have is an e-mail address. Now have no way to contact them! Unfortunately, they must have changed their e-mail addresses and we have lost the link to these folks. James Meza's Sister's e-mail was one of these that was returned. I specifically remember pleading with her to let us have her mailing address...but she declined. We could not invite her to the reunion event this year as a result.

I'm sorry...sometimes I just "don't get it" ...that is, I don't understand why these folks would not provide us with the means to keep them informed of our efforts to keep their loved one's memories alive! This past year, Barbara Daniels, Myself, Jimmy Segars, and several volunteers have had people be "very short" with us...one even hung up on one of our men! I want to thank all of you who helped us in this effort. We will be soliciting names to help us with these phone calls in the next two years....as we still do not have contact information for dozens of our KIA's families. Barbara can research and come up with phone numbers...but we need people to make the calls and confirm that the number is for our man's family.

I did not keep track of phone calls I received in response to the letters mailed via the USPS...but it was probably close to a dozen.

As I stated on the "list of attendees" (It is growing every day!) we currently have about 16 or so who will most likely attend the memorial service, including 2 of LT Frank Webb's Room Mates from Virginia Military Institute!

See you there!
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Re: KIA Family Invitation Mailing Recap

Postby Jim Edwards » Sat Jul 18, 2009 2:50 pm

Jim did you contact Bill Farrell's brother?
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Re: KIA Family Invitation Mailing Recap

Postby Jim Sheppard » Sun Jul 19, 2009 3:11 am

Everyone whose contact information I had on July 3rd was contacted...either by "snail mail" or by e-mail. You sent me the two brother's names and addresses on June 30th...so they made the cut.

I have not heard from them.

Why don't you give them a call and make sure they got the letters.
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