Each Christmas, Barb Perez makes it a point to honor every Fort Drum soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice.

“I am looking for my brother Patrick, so that we can put his picture up [on] the tree,” Perez said, as she sorted through hundreds of photos. “He's in uniform. It looks like he’s big and goofy. I think his ribbon was purple."

Photos became ornaments on a special Christmas tree at the Fort Drum exchange, as Gold Star families — families whose loved ones have died during military service — decorated the tree to honor those no longer here.

“Patrick was with military intelligence here at Fort Drum. He was the little brother I didn't ask for and was super great anyway,” Perez said as she found his photo. “I actually wish that ornament wasn't up there on that tree. But to be able to put that ornament on the tree and to forever remember my brother in this way is really important to me."

Perez is not alone.

“This is my husband, Jason Sonnenfeld,” Iva Sonnenfeld said, holding a photo of her husband, who died on Veterans' Day in 2017.

“Erick was 22 years old. He lived in Brownsville, where we did. He went to the Glen Park School System,” retired soldier Ron Klusacek of his son, fallen soldier Sgt. Erick Klusacek.

“My boy,” he added as he put a photo on the tree.

It's a legacy that brings the families together to love and to support each other.

“You never forget. It's an everyday ... you know, you wake up, you go to bed, you're thinking about it,” Sonnenfeld said.

“It's really good in the sense that you're sort of walking the same journey together," Perez said of the connection between families, "and that while everybody's grief is different, you all are experiencing some of the same emotions that someone who hasn't lost someone doesn't understand or can't appreciate sort of where you are and what you're feeling."

Of the more than 100 photos on the tree, a couple are from the early days of Fort Drum, before the military's response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.