Some 250 volunteers spent the week before Memorial Day carefully locating the more than 7,000 members of the U.S. military who are buried among the hundreds of thousands of individuals buried at the sprawling 40-acre site at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Washington Greys Military Cadets Major Fernando Maria joined 35 youngsters to locate the veterans at the landmark cemetery. They were given maps of the cemetery, identifying G.I.s with the placement of an American flag by their tombstone.

“We’ve been here since about 10 in the morning,” said Maria. “We had four sheets, roughly about 500 graves. We completed one whole section and my other three team leaders completed good portions of their sections.”

Asked if it was time well spent, Maria replied, “Absolutely. It’s a great way to spend the weekend. It gives these kids a sense of respect for the people that served our country and gives them a little pride.”

Notable military veterans at Woodlawn Cemetery include newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who came to America in 1864 to serve with the Union Army during the American Civil War; Bronx native Staff Sergeant Natale A. Greco, whose B-24 plane was shot down over Germany during WWll and Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Colon-Perez, a Purple Heart recipient who was killed in action in South Vietnam.

Scouring for deceased veterans in a cemetery that’s the final home to 310,000 individuals has proven to be a challenge.

“…[O]ne of our volunteers has been going through meaningful archives and looking at death certificates and it will give the profession as being in the military or else it will show they died while in the military,” Susan Olsen, the historian at the Woodlawn Conservancy, said. “Other volunteers have been reading obituaries, so they will find it in the obituaries.”

Olsen noted that the website Ancestry.com provides many service records from WWll.  “So that’s how we keep coming up with more names. It’s really a challenge for a private cemetery, because we only have so many military markers, especially those buried in mausoleums. Nobody would know they served and this is how we’re figuring it out.”

The 150 members of the Woodlawn Conservancy are a dedicated group of volunteers who continue research on the architecture of the mausoleums, biographies of the individuals buried at Woodlawn and identifying military veterans.

Other groups that participated this year included Boy Scout Troop 25 from Yonkers, Girl Scout Troop 1185, the New York Bank of Mellon and workers from Jet.com.

Editor’s Note: For more information on the Woodlawn Conservancy, visit their website at www.thewoodlawncemetery.org/woodlawn-conservancy/.