Veterans Helping Veterans

Northern Indiana Funeral Care of Fort Wayne began operations in 2010 and is quickly becoming the leader of providing low cost funeral and cremation services with an emphasis on the veteran population. Bryan Jenisch is the Veterans Funeral Care representative for Northern Indiana Funeral Care and spends long hours ensuring veterans and their families receive all VA benefits related to cemetery, funeral, and cremation needs. The story he relates below is just one reason why Veterans Funeral Care has enjoyed the exclusive endorsement of The American Legion, Department of Indiana, since 2006.

He says “I had an elderly lady call me two weeks after her husband had died. Her kids were over at her house trying to help keep the utilities from being shut off.” This veteran’s widow had seen an ad by Veterans Funeral Care that had been placed in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette some time ago and filed it away for future reference. However, on the day her husband died she couldn’t find the ad so she called another local Fort Wayne funeral home. As she explained it “I had to end up borrowing money from several family members to lay my husband (a WW II vet) to rest because it was so expensive. They didn’t even ask about military honors. There was no rifle salute, taps, or even folding the flag and giving it to me.”

Now she is being told by a representative of a local cemetery in Fort Wayne that she has to buy a $2000 head stone and that her husband is not entitled to one from the VA. Two weeks after her husband died she found the newspaper ad and contacted Mr. Jenisch. He explained to her that she is entitled to receive a memorial through the Veterans Administration as long as his discharge was anything other than dishonorable. She said she was sure her husband had served with distinction so they are currently in the process of filing the necessary paperwork to secure a copy of her husband’s discharge papers (form DD 214). This document will allow her to file a claim with the VA for the marker and also the Presidential Memorial Certificate. She expressed to Mr. Jenisch “I’m relieved but still upset that my husband did not receive military honors. Unfortunately it can’t be done over.” Mr. Jenisch, having served 21 years in the United States Military, stated simply “without question, the way this lady was treated is a disgrace and totally unacceptable.”

Through much experience Veterans Funeral Care finds that only a small number of veterans are fully aware of VA benefits while spouses and other family members are usually in the dark, too. They don’t know what options are available and when the veteran dies they have no idea what to do.

Mr. Jenisch says he continues to hear a lot of myths. “It concerns me that these benefits have never been claimed by a family who’s entitled to them for the simple reason of not knowing they existed. In many cases these benefits total into the thousands of dollars.”

The people who work for Veterans Funeral Care are passionate about making sure veterans AND THEIR FAMILIES are aware of all the benefits available through the VA related to cemetery, funeral, or cremation needs. They focus on not only educating veterans, but more importantly how they can apply or help to apply for these benefits so families don’t fall victim to erroneous or fraudulent information.

It makes you wonder what would motivate those in the funeral and cemetery business to sink to such depths. Greed? Laziness? Ignorance? Most likely it’s a combination of desiring greater profits combined with a lack of commitment to their chosen work. Whatever the reason it’s important when planning for these needs that you know who you’re dealing with. You should ask to meet the owner and spend time figuring out who they are and the standards they uphold. Ask questions like “How long have you been a funeral director in this area?” and “What’s the most important thing you can tell me about how you conduct business?” and “What’s your commitment to veterans?” Make sure the pricing is easy to understand and fully explained because you should never feel confused or unsure when making funeral or cremation arrangements.

Northern Indiana Funeral Care of Fort Wayne is committed to providing inexpensive, not cheap, funeral and cremation services to families in all Northern Indiana. They love serving veterans and consider it an honor when given this sacred trust. The savings are usually 40% or more on the prices of funerals (including caskets) and cremations (including urns) compared to other Fort Wayne funeral homes. As the exclusive provider of Veterans Funeral Care in Northeast Indiana we also actively encourage and promote the use of National and State Veterans Cemeteries. If you would like to learn more about this program please visit their website at www.northernindianafuneralcare.com or email vfccounselor@yahoo.com. If you would like to speak to Bryan Jenisch he can be reached toll-free at 877-382-2756. Phones are answered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Veterans Funeral Care through Northern Indiana Funeral Care serves the following Indiana counties: Adams, Allen, Dekalb, Huntington, Lagrange, Noble, Steuben, Wells, and Whitley.

Red Skelton – Pledge of Allegiance Explained

Where Death Comes Cheap

On Jan. 10, Diane and Randy Bathurst were having breakfast when Randy began to feel ill. He excused himself to lie down, and a moment later Diane heard a thud. When she arrived in the bedroom, Randy, 58, was unconscious on the floor. Paramedics couldn’t resuscitate him; doctors said he had died instantly of a massive heart attack. Two days later, his widow is in a conference room in suburban Detroit meeting with Tom Macksoud, who runs a business called Simple Funerals. Bathurst, who has little income, wants a basic cremation with no casket and no service—just the way Randy would have wanted it. A traditional funeral home wanted to charge her $3,200. Macksoud’s operation—with no employees, chapel or embalming room, just himself and the Chrysler Town & Country minivan he uses as a hearse—can do it for $1,100. “Thank you,” Bathurst says, tearing up. “This means I can make two more house payments.” Macksoud hugs her and, two days later, single-handedly retrieves her husband’s 300-pound body from the rival funeral home and maneuvers it into his minivan, a process that takes more than an hour and leaves him exhausted. “Sometimes I think I should charge by the pound,” he says.

With its revenue directly tied to the death rate, the $15 billion funeral industry has always been seen as recession-proof. No matter how bad the economy, people always die and families always spend money memorializing them, often equating dollars spent with respect paid, and rarely shopping around. Funeral homes tend to be the oldest businesses in town and generally earn solid profits—one reason why, in the 1990s, large, publicly traded corporations began rolling up the industry. But this recession is proving different—and as it deepens, families are beginning to seek ways to cut bills that were once seen as sacrosanct. Long-term trends (like the growing acceptance of cremation) are coalescing with the down economy to lead some industry veterans to sense a shift. “There’s a major movement toward low-cost options right now,” says R. Brian Burkhardt, a funeral director in Wheaton, Ill., who writes an industry blog called Your Funeral Guy. “Those businesses that adjust will do fine—and those that don’t will be gone.”

For Macksoud, 46, this penny-pinching couldn’t come at a better time. For 20 years Macksoud worked in big funeral homes and eventually bought his own in Lapeer, Mich., a blue-collar town about 50 miles north of Detroit. But a few years ago he started noticing a change: fewer people were asking for the extravagant memorial service with the steel casket and limousine-led procession. “I realized all I needed was an office, a computer and my own car,” he says. So in 2004 he sold his Lapeer business for $757,000, then took a few years off to spend time with his four kids.

Last fall he jumped back in with Simple Funerals, which he runs from a 1,500-square-foot storefront in a strip mall next to a dry cleaner. There’s a sitting room with an oriental rug, and a wall of shelves holding urns (starting at $90). Toward the back, Macksoud displays three coffins, starting at $495. (He sends folks seeking something higher-end to Costco, which has carried caskets since 2004.) Macksoud subcontracts with traditional funeral homes to use their embalming rooms and to store bodies. With such low overhead, his customer’s average bill is less than $1,200, compared with nearly $10,000 for a traditional funeral. “It’s not about the size of your funeral home or how many Cadillacs you have—it’s about the service you provide,” he says.

Macksoud is 6 feet 1 with dark, thinning hair and a plain, soft-spoken manner. If you spot him driving around in his minivan—which carries a whiff of formaldehyde—you might guess he’s an accountant or insurance agent. And while laypeople think funeral directors spend all day with dead bodies, much of Macksoud’s business involves paperwork: ferrying death certificates to get physicians’ signatures, dealing with the medical examiner and then off to the county clerk’s office. Along the way, the phone connected to his dashboard-mounted navigation system rings every so often. “Simple Funerals,” he says, keeping his eyes on the road. “This is Tom.”

On many calls, he winds up alerting consumers to money-saving options they didn’t know existed. For instance, a widow from Pontiac calls about her husband, a veteran who’s just died. Macksoud tells her that as a veteran, he’s entitled to a free plot, vault and grave marker in the Great Lakes National Cemetery—something the traditional funeral home she’d called first hadn’t mentioned. “They would have missed out on selling her a vault and expensive plot,” Macksoud says. “She was so appreciative. When things like that happen, I know I’m doing the right thing.”

Rival funeral directors aren’t so sure: last month the Michigan Funeral Directors Association asked him to stop attending meetings, annoyed at this new competition. “That made me feel really bad. I didn’t expect the business to take off so suddenly, and I think it’s spooked some people,” Macksoud says. “I thought there’d be some backlash, but I didn’t anticipate this.” If the industry is spooked, it’s probably because they’re seeing other low-cost providers thriving during hard times. At Newcomer Funeral Homes, a discount outlet based in Topeka, Kans. (where a casketed funeral costs just $4,000), business was up 10 percent in 2008. Outside Seattle, Barton Family Funeral Service charges just $695 for a cremation; it’s seen business double every year since 2005, and now does 140 funerals a month—a good year’s worth of work for many traditional homes. “So many of the cultural aspects of funerals have been imposed by the industry,” says Barton Family’s cofounder, Craig Barton. “People have come to believe that spending a lot of money is the only way to do it because that’s what the funeral industry has told them.”

Now it’s cultural shifts that are allowing some of these discount options to thrive. Chief among them is the growing acceptance of cremation, which accounted for less than 4 percent of funerals in the mid-1960s, but more than one third of them last year. (Some observers expect the cremation rate to hit 60 percent by 2025.) Cremation cuts out the three most expensive pieces of a funeral: the casket, the embalming process and the grave plot. Industry critics say that as consumer preference has shifted toward cremation, funeral homes are jacking up prices in an attempt to preserve profits in a declining market. “Since they can’t sell you another funeral down the road, they end up charging more,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, an industry watchdog group. The numbers suggest that’s true: from 2000 to 2008, the price of a casketed funeral rose 30 percent, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, whose members claim the spiking costs of raw materials that go into caskets, like steel and copper, are largely to blame.

Some longtime practitioners dispute the idea that the recession is causing a radical change in industry practices. “We see that families are hurting and are perhaps being more conservative with what they spend,” says Michael St. Pierre, a fifth-generation funeral director and CEO of Wilson St. Pierre Funeral Service and Crematory in Indianapolis. “But the fact is, the economic downturn is not affecting the fundamental way that we’ve done business for 114 years.” St. Pierre says that about 35 percent of his customers prepay their funerals—a practice that could begin to go out of style, considering two recent cases of alleged fraud in Illinois and Missouri that have sapped more than $1 billion from the prepaid accounts of some 100,000 people in a handful of states. “The entire prepaid funeral industry is on the verge of collapse,” says the FCA’s Slocum.

Macksoud is betting that, over time, the cost consciousness he’s seeing continues to spread. In fact, he recently trademarked the name Simple Funerals to head off competition. Business is already significantly exceeding his expectations. He figured he’d do 60 funerals his first year and lose money, but based on his first few months of operations, he’s now on track to do 80 funerals and break even. He retains some of the traditional tools of the trade; when he pulls his minivan into his garage at home after a long day at work, he can look up to the rafters, where he stores the road signs and traffic cones required for the pomp of the traditional funeral procession from church to grave site. But mostly that equipment gathers dust, as more clients opt for a quieter, thriftier way of death.

Author: Matthew Philips, Newsweek

Funeral Webcasting in Northern Indiana, Pt. 2

Through the use of leading-edge technologies and innovative designs, Northern Indiana Funeral Care of Fort Wayne offers simple and dependable webcasting to complement your family’s memorial service with dignity and ease. Following the event, the funeral service is available to view online for 30 days and digital recordings of the service can be purchased for a smalll fee.  Please contact Northern Indiana Funeral Care at 1-877-382-2756 for more information.

Q:  Will anybody be able to view this webcast … even strangers?
A:  No. All live and on-demand webcasts are secured with login and password control distributed by the family.

Q:  If friends and family members are unable to view the funeral live, will they be able to watch at a later time?
A:  Yes. The entire service will be available to those invited to view for a period of 30 days after the service.

Q:  What kind of equipment is required by friends and family to view the service webcast?
A:  A computer (either Windows or Mac), a browser and an Internet connection. No special software is required.

Q:  Will friends and family members need to be computer experts to use this service?
A:  No special computer skills are required. Anyone capable of Internet browsing or email can use this service.

Q:  How many friends and family members can use the service at once?
A: There is no limit to the number of people able to view at one time.

Funeral Webcasting in Northern Indiana

The death of a friend or family member is a difficult and trying time in life. Honoring someone’s life is a special and sacred moment for all survivors. Unfortunately, many mourners are not able to attend funerals due to illness, travel expenses or simply living too far from the funeral service. Friends and family members not afforded this memory are limited to participation via phone, cards of sympathy and flowers.

However, today’s technology has changed the way distant friends and families can participate in memorial services. Live and on-demand funeral webcasting from Memorial Streams offers family members access to special memorial services regardless of their location or circumstances. Northern Indiana Funeral Care of Fort Wayne now offers this unique service that provides friends and family members a secure and private connection to the memorial service via the Internet.

Through the use of leading-edge technologies and innovative designs, Northern Indiana Funeral Care of Fort Wayne offers simple and dependable webcasting packages to complement your family’s memorial service with dignity and ease. Following the event, the funeral service is available to view online for 30 days and digital recordings of the service can be purchased for a small fee. Please contact Northern Indiana Funeral Care 1-877-382-2756 for more information.

Navy Emblem

The first American Navy seal was adopted by the Continental Congress on May 4, 1780 for the Board of Admiralty. This seal was affixed to naval officer commissions, and was described  as follows:

“the arms, thirteen bars mutually supporting each other, alternate red and white in a blue field, and surmounting an anchor proper. The crest a ship under sail. The motto Sustentans et Sustentatum. The legend U.S.A. Sigil. Naval.”

The ship on the seal wore a national ensign at the stern and a commission pennant on top of the mainmast. The Continental Navy of the American Revolution went out of existence in 1785 with the sale of the last ship, USS Alliance. When a separate Navy Department was founded in 1798, the Board of Admiralty seal was no longer used. Naval officer commissions from 1798 to 1849 carried a distinctly different seal which contained the basic elements of the current official seal — the sea, ship under sail, eagle and anchor.

The seal again underwent change about 1850 as the design came even closer to that which is in use today. Neither the 1798 nor the 1850 seal seems to have had any specific authorization. The century following the appearance of the 1850 design witnessed variations in the position and shape of the eagle, ship and anchor. Sometimes land was shown on the seal, and at other times only water. Likewise, the several Navy Bureaus and Offices employed a variety of seal designs. For years prior to 1957, when the present seal was adopted, military and civilian officials within the Navy expressed the need for an official seal of uniform design.

Naval records reveal an interest in and awareness of the many variations which had crept into the seal details. Concerted effort to arrive at a redesigned standard seal for use by the Navy, afloat and ashore, awaited the post-World War II period. Recommendations from Secretaries of the Navy, heraldic experts, and historians resulted in this final seal design approved by President Eisenhower, and promulgated by Executive Order 10736 on 23 October 1957:

On a circular background of fair sky and moderate sea with land in sinister base, a three-masted square-rigged ship underway before a fair breeze with after topsail furled, commission pennant atop the foremast, National Ensign atop the main, and the commodore’s flag atop the mizzen. In front of the ship a Luce-type anchor inclined slightly bendwise with the crown resting on the land and, in front of the shank and in back of the dexter fluke, an American bald eagle rising to sinister regarding to dexter, one foot on the ground, the other resting on the anchor near the shank; all in proper colors. The whole within a blue annulet bearing the inscrip tion “Department of the Navy” at top, and “United States of America” at the bottom, separated on each side by a mullet and within a rim in the form of a rope; inscription, rope, mullet, and edges of annulet all gold.

Land in the design would symbolize the Navy’s supporting shore facilities as well as the fleet’s amphibious strike capabilities. Since the wording “Navy Department,” used on earlier seals, had generally come to signify only the headquarters activities in Washington, the inscription was changed to “Department of the Navy” in order to embrace the Navy’s total world-wide operations afloat, in the air, and ashore.

Northern Indiana Funeral Care offers military-themed caskets available in all branches of service.  Request a brochure here, call us at 877-382-2756 or email vfccounselor@yahoo.com for more information.

Reference: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq43-1.htm

Celebration of Life

Let us help you celebrate the life of your loved one.  Advance planning is a great way to preserve memories.  Visit our website, request a brochure or call 1-877-382-2756 for more information.

Army Emblem

Background: The traditional seal used since the Revolution was redesignated as the Seal of the Department of the Army by the National Security Act of 1947. The Department of the Army seal is authorized by Section 3011, Title 10, United States Code. The date “MDCCLXXVIII” and the designation “War Office” are indicative of the origin of the seal. The date (1778) refers to the year of its adoption. The term “War Office” used during the Revolution, and for many years afterward, was associated with the Headquarters of the Army.

Description: In the center is a Roman cuirass below a vertical unsheathed sword, point up, the pommel resting on the neck opening of the cuirass and a Phrygian cap supported on the sword point, all between, on the right an esponton and, on the left a musket with fixed bayonet crossed in saltire behind the cuirass and passing under the sword guard. To the right of the cuirass and esponton is a flag of unidentified designs with cords and tassels, on a flagstaff with spearhead, above a cannon barrel, the muzzle end slanting upward behind the cuirass, in front of the drum, with two drumsticks and the fly end of the flag draped over the drumhead; below, but partly in front of the cannon barrel, is a pile of three cannon balls. To the left of the cuirass and musket is a national color of the Revolutionary War period, with cords and tassels, on a flagstaff with spearhead, similarly arranged above a mortar on a carriage, the mortar facing inward and in front of the lower portion of the color and obscuring the lower part of it; below the mortar are two bomb shells placed side by side. Centered above the Phrygian cap is a rattlesnake holding in its mouth a scroll inscribed “This We’ll Defend.” Centered below the cuirass are the Roman numerals “MDCCLXXVIII.”

Symbolism: The central element, the Roman cuirass, is a symbol of strength and defense. The sword, esponton (a type of half-pike formerly used by subordinate officers), musket, bayonet, cannon, cannon balls, mortar, and mortar bombs are representative of Army implements. The drum and drumsticks are symbols of public notification of the Army’s purpose and intent to serve the nation and its people. The Phrygian cap (often called the Cap of Liberty) supported on the point of an unsheathed sword and the motto, “This We’ll Defend,” on a scroll held by the rattlesnake is a symbol depicted on some American colonial flags and signifies the Army’s constant readiness to defend and preserve the United States.

Northern Indiana Funeral Care offers military-themed caskets available in all branches of service.  Request a brochure here, call us at 877-382-2756 or email vfccounselor@yahoo.com for more information.

Reference: http://www.history.army.mil/reference/Heritage/Emblem.htm