TEXARKANA, Texas-After nearly 80 years, the remains of Samuel Cyrus Steiner, a U.S. Navy enlisted man and MIA in the attack on Pearl Harbor, will be brought here, for a funeral service Saturday.
Steiner, who was just 20 years old, had been missing in action since the Dec. 7, 1941, attack and was serving aboard the battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma at the time. His funeral service will be at East Memorial Funeral Home at 9 a.m. at 602 Olive St. in downtown Texarkana.
Following the service, Stiener's remains will be taken to a Camp Ground Cemetery near Winthrop, Arkansas for burial - a town not too far from where he grew up in the Arkinda community in Little River County.
Having enlisted in the Navy in the spring of 1940, 19-year-old Steiner spent a few moments saying goodbye to family members before heading out to Little Rock to eventually be sworn in later in the summer of that same year.
Steiner, who was born April 4, 1921, would be assigned to the U.S.S. Oklahoma in the fall of 1940 where he served as a Fireman First Class.
Between December 1941 and June 1944, the Navy continued to find the remains of unidentified servicemen from the battleship before interring them at two-Hawaiian-based cemeteries.
Shortly after World War II ended, the U.S. Army formed the American Graves Registration Service, which commenced work in September of 1947 on disinterring those who died aboard the Oklahoma. This process lead to an additional 35 members of the battleship's crew, being identified. The rest of the remains were placed into 62 caskets and reburied as "unknowns" in 46 plots at the
National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific shortly before 1950, according to internet information.
Starting in 2015, the U.S. Department of Defence went to work identifying the rest Oklahoma's servicemen's remains.
In March of this year, the Navy notified Steiner's living relatives of the his positive identification. He was one of 428 men serving on the Oklahoma who went missing in action.