(Des Moines)- Nine Iowa unclaimed veterans and two spouses will be laid to rest on June 18 at Iowa Veterans Cemetery in Van Meter, and the public is strongly encouraged to attend. KCCI TV reports Hamilton’s Funeral Home, along with the Missing in America Project, will secure their final resting place. The group consists of Army, Navy and Marine Corps veterans. One World War II veteran and his wife will also be laid to rest in the ceremony. Many of those veterans died alone, and had no one to claim their cremated remains, and end up on the shelf of a funeral home. In other instances, the urn of an Army Veteran was stolen from a home and ended up at an intersection in Des Moines. It had been stolen from his sister’s house after she died.

The service will take place at Hamilton’s Funeral Home on Westown Parkway on Friday, June 18 at 12:30 p.m., followed by burial with military honors at 2 p.m. at Iowa Veterans Cemetery. A Patriot Guard procession to the cemetery will go down Westown Parkway, until Jordan Creek Parkway, and then onto Interstate 80 going westbound.

The funeral home’s director says she hopes the public will attend and people will bring their children. She also hopes it will raise the public’s awareness, and the others in her business will check their shelves and make sure that they don’t have people the abanonded cremains of those that have served our country.