My team and I recovered a huge amount of dog-tags, we aim to return as many to the families of these soldiers as we can as seen in the media
Unless you have been living in a cave with no means of contacting the outside world, you have probably seen this story all over the TV and newspapers. Somehow it has even spread to other countries too! Fantastic. So most people will already be aware of our mission to return as many of these 14,000 British Army dog-tags back to the families.
for anyone who has somehow escaped this story, www.extremerelichunters.com/fadt is a good place to catch up.
At present these is two people working on this projects, myself and Katey who is ERH’s lead researcher. She has already single handedly tracked down another ten families and veterans over the past two weeks. Providing me with names and address of whom I can return dog-tags too. The amount of joy, thanks and warmth that people share with us when they understand what we are doing. Its like we are reconnecting them with love ones, people start to notice things in photographs they had never noticed before and they look for items belonging to loved ones that they didn’t really pay much attention to before. We do this because its the right thing to do, at least that’s how we see it. We could never believe that so many people would ask if they could help, donate or would be interested that way that they have. We really feel part of something special.
However when I started this project, I was a bit nieve and thought. I will just research them and send them home. It never occured to me that there would really be any costs involved. However, like everything in the world, it costs money. To access certainly files online we have to pay, I had to buy all the boxes and trays to sort these dog-tags, all the cleaning produces to get them clean so I could read them, the large coin folders to hold dog-tags of interest, the petrol back and forth to the site, all the stationary.. however the one that will really sink us is the postage. £1.75 per dog-tag. Ok, sure, it doesn’t sound a lot… but we have 14,000! Anyone have a spare £20k! Of course we will never be able to return them all, its just not possible. Although my target I have set is a 1000. Don’t expect us to stop if we get to return a 1000, of course we won’t. This task will never end!
Almost all the information you will need is on www.extremerelichunters.com. For any questions send us a mail through that website, you can of course join us on our facebook group.
I don’t expect everyone to donate, that will be stupid, but if you can spare anything towards this project it will be so greatfully recieved and used to get these dog-tags to where they rightfully belong.
Dan Mackay
Extreme Relic Hunters