Honorees

What you see today at the Colorado Freedom Memorial site is not a finished product but the beginning of a journey. Including the Memorial itself.

How the Honorees Were Identified

Perhaps the most difficult task of the last 17-years has been identifying the veterans who should be honored on the glass panels of the Colorado Freedom Memorial. Seems like it would be easy enough but there’s a reason something like this hasn’t been tackled before.

At our very first brainstorming meeting, this is the criteria set for inclusion on the Memorial.

  • Colorado had to be the veterans home of record when they entered service
  • The veterans death must have come from combat action, or wounds suffered in action
  • The veterans time in service must be from the Spanish-American War through today

This gave us our starting point and we began to look for names. That’s when things got tough. In every war America has fought the method of keeping records was different. Technology and society have changed over the years and what was important to know in 1918 didn’t apply in 2008. And as records have been transferred from paper, to microfiche, to computer, mistakes have been made and names left off. So, we started our effort to create a proper accounting from county clerk records, Colorado state archive records, Department of Defense records, Newspaper archives and other sources. The result of that effort is before you today, all 6218 names we are confident of.  This number is over 400 more than we had at the beginning of our work which is a point of pride for us as we have been able to honor hundreds who were once lost to history.

Accuracy of the Memorial Names

Is the Colorado Freedom Memorial 100% accurate? Sadly, the answer is no. It’s the most accurate accounting of Colorado veterans killed in action that we know of, but we’re certain there are more names to discover. In fact, we have already discovered almost four hundred names since the Memorial was built.

Five years after it’s dedication we know full well our work is far from over. This summer we are excited for a soon-to-be announced campaign to locate names of fallen veterans that should be on the Memorial.  We’ll be reaching out to all 64 of Colorado’s counties asking for citizens to check our database and make sure their fallen family members are remembered.

We’d also love photos and bios of the honorees so we can start telling future generations not only names, but who these heroes were. A panel of military members, historians and Colorado citizens reviews names that have been submitted for consideration to be added to the Colorado Freedom Memorial. It is our intention to keep searching and researching until the day we can stand in front of this monument and say… there they ALL are!

Adding Future Names

With each conflict Colorado veterans have fought and died in techniques for record keeping has changed and as new technology came along and lists were converted from old records, names were sometimes misspelled, or misfiled. Because of this the Colorado Freedom Memorial Foundation has volunteers who continue to research thousands of records, websites, family histories, genealogy sites, county clerk’s offices, old newspapers and military records looking for Colorado heroes lost in the shuffle.

So we can recognize our fallen as soon as possible, when we discover and confirm a new name for the Memorial it is first added to the large stone marker to the left of the Memorial as you look at it. We have named this the “Transition Stone.”  Replacing a glass panel to add the new names costs a minimum of $40,000 per panel and requires a special fund raising campaign. Obviously there’s a limit to how often we can accomplish this, highlighting the significance of the Transition Stone.