John Repka forged his own birth certificate at age 16 so he could enlist and serve his adopted country in World War I, shoveling coal in the bowels of a Navy ship for three years. He died in 1988 in Chicago. But it wasn't until this year that his ashes, and those of his wife, Celia, finally found a resting place, after decades sitting untouched inside a storage unit.
Repka's grandson, Ralph Conner, had long assumed his grandfather had been properly buried in Chicago, according to WKRN News 2. Instead, Conner learned in July that his grandparents' cremated remains had never been interred at all — they had simply been left in storage. Repka was born in Poland in 1902 and came to America at age five, before enlisting in the U.S. Navy during World War I under a falsified age.
Repka served for three years as a coal shoveler, a physically brutal role in a ship's engineering spaces. The Navy officially phased out the job title of Coal Passer in 1917 as the fleet shifted from coal to oil power during the war, reclassifying those boiler-room workers as Firemen, according to naval historical records. Repka's underage enlistment was not unusual for the era — an estimated 250,000 underage recruits managed to enlist during World War I by forging documents or exploiting inconsistent civil birth registries, according to military history research published by Forces War Records.
A Family Sets Things Right
Once Conner learned the truth about the stored ashes, he moved to formally lay his grandparents to rest. Celia Repka died in 1999 at age 99, having outlived her husband by more than a decade. Conner described his grandfather as a proud American, and told the station that correcting the situation was about restoring forgotten dignity.
The family wanted to provide military and religious dignity through a final resting place, Conner said, per the same account. He called the ceremony itself not emotional, but said formally laying his grandparents to rest was unique.
A Final Resting Place at Middle Tennessee
John and Celia Repka were ultimately interred together at Middle Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery in Nashville. The Tennessee Department of Veterans Services opened the McCrory Lane facility in July 2018 to expand burial capacity for veterans across the region, according to a WATE 6 On Your Side post. The 70-acre cemetery handles up to four burials a day and is projected to meet local veteran interment needs through 2085, per a Tennessee National Guard report cited by NewsChannel 5. As of May, the cemetery contained nearly 14,000 interred veterans and eligible family members, according to the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.
Nashville's facility is one of five state-operated veterans cemeteries in Tennessee, alongside sites in Memphis, Parkers Crossroads, and two in Knoxville, all built to National Cemetery Administration standards, according to the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services.
How Forgotten Ashes Find Their Way Home
Cases like Repka's are not isolated. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has pointed to volunteer initiatives such as the Missing in America Project, which works with funeral homes and public administrators nationwide to locate and identify unclaimed cremated remains of veterans sitting on shelves or in storage facilities. Tennessee lawmakers addressed the underlying legal gap in 2012, when the General Assembly passed Public Chapter No. 828, allowing funeral directors to assume legal disposition rights for unclaimed remains when no next of kin is available or willing to act.
Federally, the National Cemetery Administration guarantees free gravesites, headstones, burial flags, and military honors for eligible unclaimed veterans, regardless of whether they ever received a VA pension. It remains unclear exactly how or why the Repkas' ashes ended up in storage in the first place, a detail that has not been resolved.
Repka's story also echoes a broader pattern from that era of young men slipping past loose enlistment checks to serve. Corporal Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, also enlisted at 16 after falsifying his age, according to the U.S. Army. Buckles served as an ambulance driver in France, survived captivity in World War II, and died at age 110 in February 2011 — 15 years before Repka's own overdue burial finally brought his service full circle in Nashville.
