An innovative government website is making deceased veterans' graves more accessible than ever. Joe Cadotte reports from Superior.

When veterans die they may go on to a better place but in the digital age they get to live on in the internet. Since the inception of the grave finder website in 2004 the location of 6.7 million veterans’ graves are available online. And 1000 records are added every day.

The Northern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery is near Spooner. Washburn County Veterans Service Assistant Kathleen Lehmann says most people who’re looking for the graves are people tracing their ancestry.

“The way that things are moving so fast now, more of the younger people are interested in things like this for ancestry reasons. They heard about their grandfather, for instance, being in the military. And with the world being in the way it is at this point, everything is military it seems, they are interested in things like this.”

Lehmann says with the records kept online she only gets six calls a year from people asking where their family is buried.

“Especially if they were out of state and weren’t here at the time for the burial. They may have come for the funeral or they just weren’t able to come, and so they come over or they call us and I give them information I’m able to locate for them. And it may be like a grandson/granddaughter where the parents are deceased or grandparents are deceased. So they don’t have any other avenue as to find out information.”

The U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs has a new website accessible by cell phone. Lehmann says people’s ability to find a veteran’s grave with their phone won’t make a difference.

“I’m not saying that this putting on the smart phone is going to make things any quicker or even easier. Because they’ll still probably end up calling or if they have a computer, get on the computer because you can get better copies of it, you can go further into the history, location, whatever the case might be.”

More than three million Americans, including veterans of every war are buried in national cemeteries on more than 18,000 acres of land.

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