On Aug. 17, 1943, Albert H. Marks left his home in a working-class Kingston neighborhood that once occupied the site of the Dutch Village apartment complex and traveled to Albany for induction into the United States Army. Sixteen months later, on Dec. 7, 1944, the 29-year-old was killed by an artillery shell as his unit clung to a village on the German side of the Saar River in the face of strong enemy counterattacks. On Saturday, Oct. 25, 2026, PFC Albert Marks came home to Kingston, at last completing the journey he’d begun 83 years earlier.

The story of that return involves the dogged efforts of the Department of Defense to identify and recover the remains of missing servicemembers around the world, family members from Kingston to Arkansas who came together to organize a tribute to a family member none of them had ever met and a community that turned out to honor one of their own home at last.

Jolie Dunham, a retired vocal music teacher and onetime Kingston school board member grew up hearing about her mother’s cousin Albert, who had been killed fighting with Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army in Europe and never returned from the war. When her mother died, she found a box of family photos that included pictures of Marks. Later she would turn up a handwritten letter Marks’ brother – Dunham’s Uncle Henry – wrote to the army pleading for information on his whereabouts.

“Even in the last year of her life my mother would mention Albert and how they never found out what happened to him,” Dunham recalls. “I know Uncle Henry tried to find out but eventually they just said he was killed in action and they couldn’t find him, so there was nothing.”

According to documents provided to the family by Army officials, PFC Marks was serving in Company G of the 90th Infantry Division’s 357th Infantry Regiment in December 1944 when the unit was part of the push to break through the Siegfried Line, a heavily fortified zone on Germany’s border with France. In the early morning hours of Dec. 6, 1944 his unit crossed the Saar in assault boats, meeting little opposition at first. But by the next day Marks second battalion was heavily engaged in a wooded area just north of the village of Pachten as German counterattacks sought to hurl the American spearhead back across the river into France while heavy machine gun and artillery fire prevented reinforcements and supplies from reaching the battered units.

At some point that day Marks was killed by artillery fire and his unit was forced to fall back, leaving him behind. One week later, Germany launched its offensive into the Ardennes Forest and the 90th Division was rushed north to help close the breach, abandoning the fight for the Saar River bridgehead.

After the war, the American Graves Registration Command followed up on a lead that Marks had been buried in a German cemetery alongside eight other American servicemembers but a search for the remains was unsuccessful. In 1951 the Army declared Marks and 110 other Americans killed in the Saar river fight “Non-Recoverable.” That was the last mention of Marks in official files until 2018 when historians with the Department of Defense’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency began an effort to identify 2,000 sets of remains that had been recovered from the area around the Saar bridgehead and interred at an American military cemetery in Lyons, France. The same year, DPAA obtained a DNA sample from a nephew of Marks. In 2021, the remains were disinterred and eventually matched with the DNA sample.

The discovery would kick off a search for surviving relatives of Marks that began in Arkansas where DPAA officials contacted Bill O’Connell, who provided the DNA sample that led to the identification and his sister Linda O’Connell. The two decided that Alberts Marks’ remains should return to the town he grew up and where his parents and brother were buried.

“He wasn’t from [Arkansas],” Linda O’Connell told Kingston Wire back in April. “Kingston was his home and it just makes sense that he be buried there with family.”

Dunham, who had never met the O’Connells, found out about her cousin’s pending homecoming when a neighbor showed her a newspaper article about it.

“The headline said the remains of a World War II veteran were coming home and it was Albert,” said Dunham. “I literally screamed and started crying, I was amazed.”

The various branches of Marks’ family came together in Kingston Saturday with a memorial service and military funeral at Montrepose Cemetery. The O’Connells met Dunham and her family for the first time on Friday, then attended the funeral together. On Saturday, Marks’ casket, accompanied by a motorcycle escort from the nonprofit Patriot Guard Riders made its way from a funeral home in Red Hook to Montrepose along a route lined with first responders and members of veterans organizations. A full military funeral followed with the playing of taps, a rifle salute and the presentation of an American flag to the O’Connells and Dunham.

“There’s a sense of closure and it’s just overwhelming on so many levels; it was eight decades ago and he was finally coming home,” said Dunham. “I just hope he could see or feel the love, the energy, the respect that was given to him, especially by all of the first responders and veterans.”