News : Remembering 2011: Family buries Sgt. Steinford, 66 years after his final flight

Sgt. Steinford's daughter, Carol Sansenbach, and other relatives at the funeral Monday in CR.h

Soldiers carry Sgt. Steinford to his final resting place, 66 years after his death in WWII.

The Honor Guard inside the church before the ceremony.

Honor Guard members exchange salutes as they take turns standing watch over the casket.

Monte Railsback speaks to Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds before the funeral for Sgt. Steinford.

Iowa Guard members took turns standing guard over Sgt. Steinford's casket.

The 21 gun salute honors Sgt. Marvin Steinford.

The Patriot Guard members salute as soldiers place Sgt. Steinford in the hearse after the funeral.

Family members and visitors saw Sgt. Stienford's casket before the funeral.

The family watches as soldiers remove the casket from the hearse.

At rest at last: Sgt. Steinford's final journey.

Soldiers carry Sgt. Steinford's casket from the church after the funeral.

Soldiers approach the burial site with Sgt. Steinford's casket.

A new uniform and old dog tags in Sgt. Steinford's casket.

Patriot Guard members form a wall of honor as Sgt. Steinford is buried.

Soldiers cover the casket with an American flag.

Autumn Rathjens and father Scott join the tribute.

Carol Sansenbach and her family receive the flag that covered her father's casket.

Keyston vetereran and relative Ed McGivern (right) salutes as soldiers carry the casket.

Remembering 2011: Tom Boeckmann of Vinton and others stand in honor of Sgt. Steinford in June.

WWII B-17 tail gunner Lew Waters and his wife Ann came to Iowa from Ohio for Steinford's funeral.

A display honoring Sgt. Steinford's life and death.

Ed McGivern speaks during funeral.

Lew Waters, Carols Sansenbach and Scott Beechel discuss the return of Sgt. Steinford to Iowa.

Honoring the fallen...

The wind kept flags flapping throughout the internment ceremony.

Editor's Note: We wrote these stories about World War II Air Army Corps airman Marvin Steinford in June, when he was laid to rest. His remains had been found in Hungary a few years earlier. He was reported MIA just a few weeks before the end of World War II.

Carol Ann (Steinford) Sansenbach has learned more about her father in the past few years than she has known her entire life.

Sansenbach, a 1962 Vinton graduate, is the only child of Staff Sgt. Marvin Steinford, who went missing in action on March 24, 1945, and was finally buried Tuesday in Cedar Rapids.

During a press conference after the funeral, Sansenbach said she grew up knowing only that her dad, a Keystone native, was MIA.

"My mom never really talked about him much," she said.

But in 2004, when U.S. officials notified the family that Sgt. Steinford's dog tags were found in an unusual casket in a Russian military memorial site in Hungary, the family began learning more about Sgt. Steinford.

Sansenbach on Tuesday wore a locket she found in her mother's possessions a few years ago. That locket still contains a photo of her father. She discussed letters from fellow crew members which told the family about Steinford's final flight in a B-17. She knows that her father left Italy for a bombing mission in Berlin, and that enemy fire damaged three of the planes engines. She knows the crew jettisoned all they could to make the plane lighter in an effort to bring it down in friendly territory. She knows her father was last seen as his parachute descended near a German tank in Hungary, not far from where his B-17 finally went down after the crew bailed out.

The event led to more information about the airman with the nickname "Steiney."

"I learned that he was a very artistic man," Sansenbach said of her father. "I always liked to draw, and I wondered where that came from. Now I know."

After the family learned that Steinford's body had been found, Sansenbach's son-in-law, Scott Beechel, went to Hungary to learn what he could. Beechel, recently retired from the U.S. Army, had served in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was in training in Germany when the family got the news that Sgt. Steinford had possibly been found. He went to the city of Zirc, where residents there gave him pieces of the B-17 that they had kept in their possession for decades. Some of those items were on display at the church before the funeral.

What the family does not know, and probably never will, is how Sgt. Steinford came to be buried in a casket that was clearly different from the caskets used to bury Russian soldiers. No one knows who placed him in the casket, or how it came to be buried with the Russians. When city officials decided to move the war memorial, they noticed that unusual casket, beginning the seven-year chain of events that ultimately led to the repatriation of Sgt. Steinford this year.

Rev. Martha Rogers of Christ Episcopal Church discussed the meaning of repatriation, and told how it gives hope to other families of MIA service personnel that one day they too can find their loved one.

Another speaker during the funeral was Ed McGivern, who is both a Keystone veteran of the Korean War and a relative of Sgt. Steinford.

"It was a bright, sunny day when our family learned he was missing," McGivern told the congregation. Steinford volunteered to serve, said McGivern, and he understood the risks.

"He also knew it was worth the risk to serve," said McGivern. "He was a gallant hero."

McGivern was a young teenager at the time; his older brother was serving in the South Pacific. He said that Steinford's actions in the spring of 1945 helped to end the war in Europe. Italy and Germany surrendered within two months of Steinford's death.