Gold Star Families: Who They Are, and How a Country Stands With Them

In the spring of 1917, with the United States newly entered into the First World War, an Army captain named Robert L. Queisser of the 5th Ohio Infantry designed a small rectangular flag to hang in the window of his home in Cleveland. The flag had a red border and a white field. In the center were two blue stars. Each star represented one of Queisser’s two sons, both serving in the U.S. Army in France. He patented the design. He called it the Service Flag.

The design spread fast. By the summer of 1918, the Service Flag was a recognizable feature of any American block with sons or daughters in uniform overseas — a blue star for each family member in service. Some families had one star. Some had three, four, five.

Then, when a family member was killed, the family sewed a gold star over the blue one. The gold star was not the original design. It was an adaptation, made by the families themselves, to mark what the blue star alone could not say.

This is where the term Gold Star Family comes from.

The flag, then the families

The Service Flag was formalized in 1918 by U.S. War Department regulation, which designated the blue-and-gold star system and codified the precedence: a gold star, when present, takes the place of the blue but does not erase it. The blue star is sewn underneath. The family is still both — still the family of a member who served, now also the family of one who died.

The flag’s official scope evolved alongside the country’s wars. The Department of Defense currently authorizes the Service Flag for the immediate family of any member of the U.S. armed forces serving during a period of war or hostilities — by current definition, this has been continuous since the post-9/11 period began.

The families came next. American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. was founded April 5, 1928, by Grace Darling Seibold, a Washington, D.C., mother whose son First Lieutenant George Vaughn Seibold had been killed flying with the 148th Aero Squadron in France in 1918. Seibold’s idea was simple: the women who had lost a child in the war shared a specific grief, and they could support each other and provide service to hospitalized veterans together. The organization received its federal charter from Congress in 1984. It now operates roughly 200 chapters across the United States.

Gold Star Wives of America, Inc., was founded April 4, 1945, by widows of servicemembers killed in the Second World War. It received its federal charter in 1980. Its focus is on the widowed spouses of fallen American servicemembers — historically widows, but the organization is now open to surviving spouses of any gender.

Beyond the parents and spouses are the Gold Star Siblings, Gold Star Sons and Daughters, and the broader Gold Star Family designation that includes children, siblings, parents, spouses, and other immediate family of a fallen American servicemember. Gold Star Survivors Day, observed on the last Sunday in September, is dedicated to this broader category. Memorial Day in May, by contrast, is for the dead themselves; the day Gold Star families hold for the country is the Sunday in September.

TAPS — the peer-mentor network

The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors was founded in 1994 by Bonnie Carroll, widow of Brigadier General Tom Carroll, who had been killed two years earlier in a 1992 Alaska military aviation accident — a C-12 plane crash that took eight lives. Carroll experienced, in the wake of her husband’s death, the gap in the U.S. military’s support architecture for surviving families. The military had a casualty assistance officer system that handled the initial notification and the first weeks. After that, families were largely on their own.

TAPS built what was missing: a peer-mentor network. Newly bereaved families are connected with surviving family members who have lived through their own loss for a longer period. Peer mentors are themselves trained Gold Star family members. TAPS is not a counseling service in the clinical sense; it is a community of families who know what each other are going through and who can, by knowing, help.

Two design choices distinguish TAPS from earlier military survivor support. First, it is open to families of servicemembers killed by any cause of death in service — combat death, training accident, vehicle accident, suicide, illness, all of it. Second, TAPS is open to extended family members, not only the spouse. Mothers, fathers, siblings, children, fiancées, and close friends are all eligible for its programs.

In its first three decades TAPS has served more than 100,000 surviving family members. It runs the Good Grief Camps for the children of fallen servicemembers, an annual Memorial Day weekend National Military Survivor Seminar in Washington, regional retreats throughout the year, and a 24/7 National Military Survivor Helpline at 800-959-TAPS.

How to stand with a Gold Star family

The plain guidance from Gold Star families themselves — collected by the federally chartered organizations and by independent reporting on the question — is short. It does not need to be ornate.

Say the name. The single most consistent piece of guidance from Gold Star families is to speak the name of the fallen family member out loud. Generic condolences fade quickly; specific names are what families remember. I’m thinking about [name] today is a more meaningful sentence than any well-meaning sentiment that leaves the name out.

Do not be afraid of the grief. Many Americans avoid Gold Star families on Memorial Day weekend because they do not know what to say and they do not want to make it worse. The consistent feedback from Gold Star families is that the avoidance is worse than the wrong words. Showing up, even awkwardly, is preferable to staying away.

Do not say I understand unless you do. A Gold Star family member rarely wants to be told that a civilian friend understands. The phrase usually arrives well-intentioned and lands wrong. I cannot imagine what this weekend is for you is more honest and more welcome.

The phrase thank you for your service is for the living. A Gold Star spouse on Memorial Day is not the servicemember. Her service was the service of supporting a person who was sent and did not come back. The thing worth recognizing is the thing she is still doing — carrying the name forward.

When in doubt, the simplest form works. I am sorry for your loss fits every case — the combat death and the training accident alike. It does not generalize, it does not assume, and it does not ask the family to correct it.

What the federal record covers, and what it does not

The federal Survivor Benefit Plan, the Dependency and Indemnity Compensation program, the Department of Veterans Affairs survivors’ programs, the Gold Star Lapel Button, the Next of Kin Lapel Button, and the casualty assistance system together constitute the United States’ formal architecture for standing with Gold Star families. These programs exist. They have been refined across multiple decades and multiple administrations. They are real, and they matter.

What the federal architecture does not cover — and what TAPS, American Gold Star Mothers, Gold Star Wives, and a handful of other organizations have built independently — is the long-tail support. A formal benefit can be administered. A peer-mentor relationship between two widows ten years into their respective losses cannot be administered by the federal government in the same way. The independent organizations exist to do what the agencies cannot.

A country with a Gold Star Mothers chapter in roughly 200 American communities and a TAPS Good Grief Camp running every summer is a country that has built the long-tail architecture as well as the formal one. Both layers are working. Both layers exist because the Gold Star families themselves organized them.

What it teaches a present-day reader

The Gold Star designation began as a piece of cloth a mother sewed over a blue star in 1918. It became, over the next century, the largest non-governmental architecture of military survivor support in the country. It teaches that the formal benefits are necessary but not sufficient — that the work of standing with the families of the dead is sustained, eventually, by the families themselves, organized for the purpose.

On Memorial Day, the practical thing a non-Gold-Star American can do is small: learn one fallen servicemember’s name, learn one Gold Star family member’s name if such a person is in your life, say the name out loud, and refrain from the language that does not belong on this day. The country has built the rest of the architecture. The personal piece — the recognition that a specific person is missing from a specific table at a specific Memorial Day weekend — is the part that does not scale.

Sources

• U.S. War Department, Service Flag regulation, 1918 — establishing the blue-star and gold-star conventions.
• Robert L. Queisser, Service Flag design and U.S. Patent, 1917.
• American Gold Star Mothers, Inc. — federal charter, 36 U.S.C. Chapter 211; founded April 5, 1928, by Grace Darling Seibold.
• Gold Star Wives of America, Inc. — federal charter, 36 U.S.C. Chapter 73; founded April 4, 1945.
• Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) — taps.org; founded 1994 by Bonnie Carroll.
• U.S. Department of Defense, Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) — 10 U.S. Code §1447.
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) — 38 U.S. Code §1310.
• Gold Star Lapel Button and Next of Kin Lapel Button — Department of Defense Instruction 1348.36.
• Gold Star Survivors Day — last Sunday in September, established by federal observance.