The remains of 28 Civil War veterans and many of their wives are receiving burial services across the country. As first reported by the Associated Press, their discovery concludes a decades-long mystery about their whereabouts while highlighting numerous stories previously lost to history.

The simple copper and cardboard urns gathering dust on shelves of a funeral home and cemetery in Seattle only had the name of each of the 28 soldiers.

There was no big fanfare. Only a handful of people gathered to pay their respects. Yet there was something profound about the simple ceremony at Pomeroy’s Union Cemetery on a chilly, late October morning when a Civil War veteran finally got a headstone.

For decades, the cremated remains on more than two dozen American Civil War veterans languished in storage facilities Washington.

Urns gathering dust on shelves only had the name of each of the 28 soldiers — but nothing linking them to the Civil War. Still, that was enough for an organization dedicated to locating, identifying and interring the remains of unclaimed veterans to conclude over several years that they were all Union soldiers deserving of a burial service with military honors.