The Cleveland Liberty Row Online Memorial strives to preserve and share a visual record of the stories of soldiers from the Cleveland, Ohio area who died in World War I. Between the years 1919-1924, Cleveland enacted an important civic project: a tree memorial known as Liberty Row to immortalize approximately 850 of its more than 1,000 war dead. (Approximately 41,000 Clevelanders served in World War I, of whom 1,023 were killed during the conflict.)
The biographical profiles of the soldiers are not presented as an in-depth genealogical archive. Rather, our goal is to identify the names of the soldiers as accurately as possible and then present a few details about each soldier before their lives were cut short by World War I. We offer a remembrance in fragmentary form.
We welcome contributions from descendants who may have additional facts or photos to share, in order to present a more complete picture of the soldiers who are represented here. We also anticipate that students or other interested parties in the future may be inclined to expand this research, such as investigating the military history of each soldier or pursuing a fuller family genealogy.
The Cleveland Liberty Row Online Memorial is a work in progress. Some pages are stil under construction or incomplete. However, the site is fully functional and ready for public use.
The editors are a public history researcher and a website designer who wish to keep alive the memory of the Liberty Row Tree memorial and the young men it enshrined, before the memorial, the fallen soldiers, and the fallen trees are lost to history.
