Gold Star Mothers: The Pilgrimages to the Overseas Graves

In the years after the First World War, thousands of American families faced an impossible distance. Their sons and husbands lay in cemeteries in France, Belgium and England, an ocean away, and most families could never hope to visit. In 1929 Congress answered that grief with something remarkable.

An act of a grateful nation

By law, the government offered to carry the mothers and widows of the American dead — the Gold Star Mothers and Widows — across the Atlantic to stand at the graves themselves, at public expense. Between 1930 and 1933, some 6,600 women made the journey.

The pilgrimage

They sailed from New York, were met with honor guards and quiet ceremony, and were escorted to the overseas cemeteries where their loved ones rested. For many it was the first time they had left their home state, let alone their country. Photographs from the pilgrimages show women in dark coats laying flowers at white headstones, often the only time they would ever do so.

The term endures

The phrase “Gold Star” comes from the service flags families hung in their windows: a blue star for a loved one in uniform, replaced by a gold star if that loved one died. The Gold Star Mothers' organization endures to this day, and the pilgrimages remain one of the most tender chapters in the history of American remembrance.

To stand at a grave is a small thing and an enormous one. A nation understood that, and for a few years it carried its grieving mothers to that ground.

Many of the men their mothers visited are recorded in this archive.