Pearl Harbor survivor helps identify unknown dead

Anonymous | U.S. Navy

FILE - In this undated file photo provided by the U.S. Navy, Petty Officer 3rd Class Alfred E. Livingston is shown. The remains of Livingston, a sailor from southern Indiana killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 65 years ago have been identified, the Navy said Tuesday, July 17, 2007. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy, file)

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Audrey McAvoy | AP

This Dec. 5, 2012 photo at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu shows a gravestone identifying it as the resting place of 7 unknowns from the USS Oklahoma who died in Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Navy and National Park Service will honor Ray Emory, a Pearl Harbor survivor who pushed to put ship names on the gravestones and identify unknown remains, on Dec. 7 for his determination to have Pearl Harbor remembered, and remembered accurately. (AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy)

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Audrey McAvoy | AP

Ray Emory discusses his work pushing to change grave markers for unknown Pearl Harbor dead and identifying the remains of unknowns at his home in Honolulu on Nov. 21, 2012. The Navy and National Park Service will honor Emory on Dec. 7 for his determination to have Pearl Harbor remembered, and remembered accurately.(AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy)

HONOLULU — Ray Emory could not accept that more than one quarter of the 2,400 Americans who died at Pearl Harbor were buried, unidentified, in a volcanic crater. And so he set out to restore names to the dead. Emory, a survivor of the attack, doggedly scoured decades-old documents to piece together who was who. He pushed, and sometimes badgered, the government into relabeling more than 300 gravestones with the ship names of the deceased. And he lobbied for forensic scientists to exhume the skeletons of those who might be identified. On Friday, the 71-year anniversary of the Japanese attack, …