Veterans,
Your military story
is our veteran history.
Your
military
story is our
veteran
history.
Help ensure that history is preserved. You record your veteran story. We store and preserve your story so your family, great-grandchildren, and country will know what you did for them.
Members,
Your membership enables veterans to preserve their story and their contribution to our American history.
Your membership enables veterans to preserve their story
and their contribution to our American history.
Become a member and help ensure that all our Veterans’ service is recorded, stored, and then better recognized and respected. Please help us educate fellow Americans about military service to our country.
Our Mission: Veterans Matter
Our Mission:
Veterans Matter
Our mission is to:
- Obtain, preserve, recognize, and respectfully honor the stories, histories, and legacy of veterans and their families
- Better educate veterans’ families and the public on the nature and magnitude of veterans’ sacrifices and contributions to the survival of our democracy
- Facilitate the communications among and between individual veterans and reunions of multiple veteran military organizations
- Help facilitate initial communications between veterans wanting or needing access to veteran-related social, medical, and mental health support organizations and/or other veteran-related benefits
- Promote the concept of a Museum of Museums (veteran and civilian) to maximize veteran and public awareness of where and how to both visit and support these important resources.
Why Join?
For $25 per year, your membership can ensure that the Veterans Museum can deliver on its mission to collect and preserve individual stories of veterans, help enable them to share those stories as they wish, and recognize and serve our veterans in ways they have long earned but too often failed to enjoy.
They served; they deployed; they left their families behind; they risked their lives and limbs. We very respectfully ask for your $25 per year support to ensure that Veterans’ service is recognized, respected and honored, helping ensure that the public is better educated about the service of veterans to America.
For $25 per year, your membership can ensure that the Veterans Museum can deliver on its mission to collect and preserve individual stories of veterans, help enable them to share those stories as they wish, and recognize and serve our veterans in ways they have long earned but too often failed to enjoy.
They served; they deployed; they left their families behind; they risked their lives and limbs. We very respectfully ask for your $25 per year support to ensure that Veterans’ service is recognized, respected and honored, helping ensure that the public is better educated about the service of veterans to America.
For $25 per year, your membership can ensure that the Veterans Museum can deliver on its mission to collect and preserve individual stories of veterans, help enable them to share those stories as they wish, and recognize and serve our veterans in ways they have long earned but too often failed to enjoy.
They served; they deployed; they left their families behind; they risked their lives and limbs. We very respectfully ask for your $25 per year support to ensure that Veterans’ service is recognized, respected and honored, helping ensure that the public is better educated about the service of veterans to America.
Join Now
BECOME A MEMBER
Using the form below, please complete the fields to either pay and join as a member or to take advantage of your FREE membership if you are a Gold Star or POW/MIA Family.
The Stories
VIEW OUR STORIES
Watch these Veterans and families share their stories of service. More stories are coming soon!
YOUR STORY
REGISTER TO SHARE YOUR STORY
If you are a Veteran and want to record your military story, please register using the form below and we will contact you. This service is FREE.
Veterans Museum Video Sign Up
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Who We Are
We are Veterans and Grateful Descendants of Veterans
How we started
The Veterans Museum founders are descendants of WW-II veteran, Maj William J. Hicklin, Jr. USAAF (1919-1993), who served from September 1941 to August 1945, and his wife Mignonette “Mig” (1920-2021). In September 2017 after Hurricane Irma hit Jacksonville, Florida, while cleaning the Hicklin’s partially flooded home storage area, Bill Hicklin’s long-forgotten, newly moisture-damaged, World War II journal was found and salvaged, along with a D-Day related Bronze Star that his children never knew he had earned.
That journal included four never-seen-before photographs taken on D-Day. The pictures showed scores of the 101st Airborne gliders ready for departure in the second wave from Aldermaston Air Field in England. That journal discovery led to a 30-minute professionally made military/family history video, “One Man’s War.”
This video received much local acclaim as it was asked to be presented at various civic, military, and religious meetings, many of which enjoyed the attendance of 99-year-young Mig Hicklin. Later, following the death of the then almost 101-year-old Mig Hicklin in March 2021, and in compliance with her wishes and estate funding, the concept of the Veterans Museum was begun; it was her/their “gift to all of us.”
We are Veterans and Grateful Descendants of Veterans
How we started
The Veterans Museum founders are descendants of WW-II veteran, Maj William J. Hicklin, Jr. USAAF (1919-1993), who served from September 1941 to August 1945, and his wife Mignonette “Mig” (1920-2021). In September 2017 after Hurricane Irma hit Jacksonville, Florida, while cleaning the Hicklin’s partially flooded home storage area, Bill Hicklin’s long-forgotten, newly moisture-damaged, World War II journal was found and salvaged, along with a D-Day related Bronze Star that his children never knew he had earned.
That journal included four never-seen-before photographs taken on D-Day. The pictures showed scores of the 101st Airborne gliders ready for departure in the second wave from Aldermaston Air Field in England. That journal discovery led to a 30-minute professionally made military/family history video, “One Man’s War.”
This video received much local acclaim as it was asked to be presented at various civic, military, and religious meetings, many of which enjoyed the attendance of 99-year-young Mig Hicklin. Later, following the death of the then almost 101-year-old Mig Hicklin in March 2021, and in compliance with her wishes and estate funding, the concept of the Veterans Museum was begun; it was her/their “gift to all of us.”
What happened next
With the March 2021 pending arrival in Jacksonville of the USS Orleck (DD-886), a soon-to-be local warship museum, an informal and then more formal relationship of mutual support evolved under the warship museum and Veterans Museum leaderships. The ORLECK leadership, with the significant financial assistance of a State of Florida Grant, had labored for over a decade to bring a warship museum to Jacksonville. During the past few years, the local relatives of the Hicklin family joined in the mutually beneficial efforts of trying to help the warship museum become what is now – a very well-visited reality. Subsequently, the Veterans Museum found the enthusiastic support of local veterans as well as that of many civic, state/local political, and educational leaders. Collectively, they made the decision to officially launch the Veteran Museum on June 6, 2024, the 80th Anniversary of D-Day.
Going forward
As stewards of veterans stories, we will endeavor to honor the Hicklin legacy and dream of collecting, preserving, and using segments of veterans’ stories to help honor the service of veterans and better educate our fellow Americans on the sacrifices and services of our veterans and active-duty military service men and women.
We hope you will join us!
Donate
SUPPORT THE VETS MUSEUM
If you would like to make a donation of any amount to the Vets Museum to help us spread the word about what we are doing to honor and memorialize United States Veterans, please use the link below to give. More giving options coming soon!
