Dr. Patricia Caldwell(click for bio)

Embrance Ambassador

Making a Memorial Slideshow for a Veteran

Somebody in the family has the folder of photographs. Somebody else has a shoebox with a picture of a nineteen-year-old in uniform who looks like a stranger. And the funeral director has already used the phrase military funeral honors, which means part of the day is settled: if honors are being rendered, a detail is coming at a time nobody in the family picked, and for a few minutes that day will run itself.

Knowing that before you build anything changes what you are building. A service with honors in it already has its ceremony. It has a formal, wordless stretch everyone present will remember, and it does not need help from a video. The slideshow is the other thing. It is the part with a kitchen in it, and a dog, and somebody laughing at their own joke in 1988.

This page is about making that second thing so it sits beside the first without either getting in the other's way. It is not a guide to the honors, which are arranged by people whose job that is.

Finding service photographs

Start in the house, not in an archive, and it helps to know why.

The National Archives is straightforward about its own limits. It holds candid and official photographs of activities and events, but of everyone who served, it says less than one percent can be found by name in its photograph indexes. It also explains where the rest went: formal portraits, individual and group, were made by private commercial photographers and sold to families at the time, and mostly never became government records.

So the picture you have in mind, the studio one with the cap squared and collar pressed, was bought by somebody's mother. It is in a house, very often not the house you have been searching. It turns up behind another print in a frame, where the spare copy was slid in years ago. In a sibling's album, since brothers and sisters were the ones getting mail from basic training and they kept it. In a wallet or Bible, because small prints were made to be carried. In a parent's estate that arrived decades ago and went straight to the attic.

Then widen who you ask, because the immediate family has looked. Cousins, the sister-in-law, the neighbor who was around then, the friend who enlisted the same summer: those calls beat another hour in the garage.

Group photography is a separate layer, often the only surviving record of those years. Navy ships and units produced cruise books, essentially yearbooks and mostly photographs; the Navy Department Library holds a collection, and copies surface through libraries, booksellers, and genealogy sites. Boot camp yearbooks and platoon photographs are gathered by the Military Yearbook Project, which the National Archives points people to. It is worth asking a unit or ship reunion association, and the local VFW or American Legion post, whether anyone kept albums: where they did, it is usually the reunion years rather than the service years. The hometown paper is worth twenty minutes too, since local papers often carried enlistment notices, promotions, and home-on-leave items, sometimes with a photograph. The Library of Congress runs Chronicling America, a free searchable collection of historic newspaper pages, though its run stops at 1963.

One thing not to attempt this week. A veteran's official military personnel file can be requested by next of kin, and a photograph is sometimes in it, but there is no guarantee and the request has its own timeline. The odds are worse for some families than others: a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center destroyed roughly sixteen to eighteen million personnel files, taking about 80 percent of Army records for people discharged between 1912 and 1960 and about 75 percent of Air Force records across a large stretch of 1947 to 1964, with no duplicates and no microfilm. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard holdings were largely spared. Send for the file if you want it. Do not build the slideshow around its arrival.

If the search ends with almost nothing from those years, that is ordinary, not a failure. One photograph is enough. It does not have to be the studio portrait either: a snapshot on a porch in a plain t-shirt with dog tags showing is a service photograph, and often a better one, because there is a person in it.

Most of what you turn up will be on paper, and nothing in the house scans. A phone at a window handles a whole stack in an evening; the method is in photographing old prints with your phone. The service years are also the oldest and least dated stretch of most folders, the difficulty sorting hundreds of undated photos sets out to solve.

What the slideshow is not replacing

Military funeral honors are a separate ceremony, arranged separately, and nothing here describes what will happen at yours. Enough of the shape, though, to know what the slideshow sits beside.

Federal law sets a floor and leaves nearly everything above it open. The statute requires a detail of two or more, at least two of them serving members of the armed forces rather than retired, and a ceremony that includes folding a United States flag, presenting it to the family, and playing Taps. Department of Defense policy adds the part families notice most: one member of the detail comes from the branch the veteran served in, and that is the person who presents the flag. Together, that is the guaranteed part.

Everything above that floor varies enormously. A rifle party, a color guard, pallbearers, a flyover: those are subject to eligibility, availability, and approval, and no family should count on them until somebody who arranges honors says yes. Who makes up the detail varies too. The Department of Defense runs a partnership program under which trained volunteers from veterans service organizations can augment a detail and take on those additional elements, which is much of why one family sees two people at a graveside and another a formation. That difference is what was available locally on a Tuesday. It measures nothing about the person.

Taps varies too, and it is the detail families most want to ask about. A live bugler is preferred. A ceremonial bugle or a high-quality recording may be used instead, and where no bugler is on the detail, the law has the detail play a recorded version and bring audio equipment if the site has none. A volunteer network, Bugles Across America, fields buglers who sound live Taps at no charge, where one is free to come. If a live bugler matters to your family, ask the funeral director early rather than hoping on the morning.

The flag is folded into a triangle and presented. Who receives it follows an order of precedence beginning with the surviving spouse, and where there is no next of kin it can go to a close friend or associate instead. If there is any question in your family about whose hands it goes into, raise it with the funeral director before the day.

Two more things and this page will stop. Honors are provided at no cost to the family, on request, and at least 48 hours is generally recommended to arrange a detail. They are also not only a graveside event: they can be rendered at a funeral or a memorial service, including where there has been a cremation.

Beyond that, whether this particular veteran is eligible, what documents establish it, and anything touching burial, a headstone, or a marker belongs to the funeral director, the funeral honors coordinator, and VA. They will know, and this page would only be guessing.

Where it fits in the day

The honors have a schedule and it is not yours. A detail travels to you and is booked into a slot, which may not be the only one it has that day. Nearly everything else can move a little. That cannot.

So work outward from the fixed points. Two questions to the funeral director settle most of it: when is the detail expected, and where in the day is there a screen and a room to use it. The answers usually land the slideshow before the service, inside it in a slot somebody assigns you, or at the reception afterward.

One arrangement surprises families every time, and it rearranges the day. If burial is at a VA national cemetery, viewing facilities are not available there and the family arranges the funeral service somewhere else. Burials happen on weekdays. The committal service takes place at a committal shelter rather than at the graveside and runs about twenty minutes, and families are asked to visit the grave at the end of the workday rather than immediately afterward. Read that plainly: at most national cemeteries there is no room, no screen, and no window for a slideshow. Facilities differ, so ask rather than assume, but plan on it playing earlier at the funeral home or church, or later at the hall.

The seated room and the room where people stand holding a plate want opposite things from the same photographs, which is the whole subject of one slideshow for the service, one for the visitation. Read it with the honors already marked on your schedule, because the slot it tells you to ask about is whatever the detail leaves you.

Tone and pacing

The temptation is to match the ceremony. Resist it.

A day with honors in it already holds the most formal minutes most people there will experience all year. If the slideshow strains for the same weight, the afternoon flattens into one register and the person disappears into it.

A few specifics, all the same idea:

• Do not put a bugle under it. Especially not Taps. It has a job that day, and it will be done properly a few feet away by people who came to do it. Duplicating it inside a video is a collision, and it lands as one.
• Choose the music from the person. Patriotic music is right if it was their music and grates if it was not. The test is never the theme of the day.
• Keep the captions thin. Rank, dates, decorations, and unit history belong in the obituary and on the program, where somebody can read them properly. On a screen they turn a face into a record.
• Hold the same beat over the uniform pictures as everything else. Slowing down for those, and only those, tells the room which part you thought mattered.

Embrance ships a Military theme, and there is a rendered example among the theme examples on the homepage if you want to watch it move. A theme sets the backdrops, motion, and music around your photographs, which is why it deserves a minute's thought rather than being picked by category. A flag-forward backdrop is the right frame for a life the uniform ran through. Under fifty years of a plumbing business and four grandchildren, it quietly relabels all of them.

A life, not a service record

This is the part that matters most, and families get it wrong with the best intentions.

The uniform years are frequently the years nobody in the family knows much about. They were not talked about, the photographs are scarce and formal and strange, and that scarcity makes them feel like the real story, the hidden center of the person. Grown children reach for them hardest, because it is the one chapter they never got told.

For some people, service was the shape of the whole life. Thirty years, a family that moved eleven times, a career with an arc to it. If that is your person, the proportions take care of themselves and you can build most of the slideshow out of those years honestly.

For many others it was a few years early on. Four, or two, or six, and then sixty years of everything else: a job, a street, somebody met at a dance, a shed, a routine, a Tuesday repeated ten thousand times. Those decades are where nearly everyone in that room actually knew them.

So do the arithmetic on the folder before you fall for the young ones. If a quarter of the slideshow is a face at nineteen, the person the neighbors sat beside for fifty years has been handed three quarters of a life. The work friends will not find the years they knew. The grandchildren will watch a slideshow about somebody they never met.

The uniform photographs already do a specific job, and they do it best exactly where they belong. They are almost always the youngest pictures in existence. Drop them in chronologically, near the start, and they carry the enormous fact that this person was once nineteen and had no idea what was coming. That lands harder than a montage would, because it arrives inside a life instead of standing in front of one.

One more thing to weigh, quietly. A great many veterans did not talk about their service, for reasons that were theirs. Leading a tribute with the thing somebody never mentioned is a real decision, and it deserves to be made deliberately rather than by default because it seemed like the respectful move. Ask the people who knew them best what belongs at the front. Sometimes the answer is the service, said plainly and proudly. Often it is the boat, or the workshop, or the grandchildren.

Either way, the service is already being said that day, by people in uniform, with a folded flag and Taps, in the most formal minutes of the afternoon. That part is covered, and covered better than a video could do it.

Let the slideshow do the other thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should be in a military funeral slideshow?

The same as any memorial slideshow: the whole life in rough order, with the service years sitting where they actually fall rather than out in front. For many veterans that means a handful of photographs from the uniform years, usually near the start because they are the youngest pictures anyone has, and then the decades that followed. If service genuinely was the shape of the life, the balance shifts and that is right. What goes wrong is a slideshow built as a service record, because most of the people in the room knew the other years and will not find themselves anywhere in it.

Where can I find a veteran's service photos?

Start with the family rather than an archive. Formal portraits were made by private commercial photographers and sold to families at the time, so they live in houses, and the National Archives says less than one percent of everyone who served can be found by name in its photograph indexes. Look behind other prints in frames, in a sibling's album, in a wallet or Bible, and widen who you ask. For group photography, Navy cruise books are held by the Navy Department Library and turn up secondhand, and boot camp yearbooks and platoon photographs are collected by the Military Yearbook Project. It is worth asking a reunion association or the local veterans post whether anyone kept albums, and hometown papers often carried service notices, sometimes with a photograph. Requesting the official personnel file is possible for next of kin but slow, and may not turn up a photograph.

Can you play a slideshow during military funeral honors?

In practice, no, and it is less a question of permission than of what honors are. The ceremony is short, formal, and self-contained, and a detail arrives to perform it in a slot fixed before your day begins, frequently outdoors where there is no screen at all. It goes elsewhere in the day instead: before the service while people arrive, inside the service in a slot the funeral director assigns, or at the reception afterward. Ask when the detail is expected before you decide, because that timing is the one part of the day that will not move for you.

How long should a veteran's memorial slideshow be?

Nothing about a veteran's slideshow changes the arithmetic, so the usual range applies: something in the five to ten minute region for a room that sits and watches, and as long as you like for a screen looping where people stand and talk. The wrinkle is that the day may carry an extra fixed item. Where honors are being rendered, the schedule is tighter than families expect and the slot offered for a video is sometimes shorter than it would otherwise be. Ask for the number of minutes rather than guessing, and build to what you are told.