Compared with online memorial sites
A memorial page collects condolences. This collects what people actually remember.
Tribute walls do something necessary in the first fortnight. They are not built for the thing a family usually wishes they had a year later.
What memorial pages do
Online memorial sites and funeral-home tribute pages carry the obituary, the service details, the donations, and a wall where people leave condolences. They exist for the days around a funeral, when people need somewhere to put something, and they do that job properly.
The messages are mostly addressed to the family: so sorry for your loss, thinking of you all, he was a lovely man. They are kindly meant and they are what the moment calls for.
Afterwards the page tends to go quiet, and the wall is a list of sympathies rather than an account of a person.
What asking for memories gets instead
Everybody who knew them holds a piece nobody else has. The man he worked beside for twenty years knows a completely different person from his daughter, and both are him.
You write the sections: where they grew up, the work, the years in the house on the hill, the things they always said. The people who knew them write their own piece under each, in their own words.
What comes back is a life assembled from every side, including whole decades the family was not there for. It can be read aloud, and it can be printed and kept.
Side by side.
| online memorial sites | How We Saw It | |
|---|---|---|
| What people write | Condolences to the family | What they remember of the person |
| Addressed to | The bereaved | The person who died |
| Timing | The days around the funeral | Whenever the family is ready, often later |
| Shape | A wall of messages | A story in sections |
| Also carries | Obituary, service details, donations | Photographs and voice recordings with each memory |
| Ends as | A page online | A story the family can keep and print |
Which one you actually want.
Use a memorial page if
- You need somewhere now, in the days before a funeral.
- People need service details, directions or a donation link.
- An obituary needs to be published and findable.
- What is wanted is a place to say sorry, which is its own necessary thing.
Use this if
- You want what people knew of them, not what they want to say to you.
- There are decades of their life the family only ever heard about secondhand.
- You would rather have thirty real memories than three hundred condolences.
- You want something a grandchild can read in twenty years.
They do not clash. The memorial page for the funeral, and a collection afterwards, when the house is quiet and people have more to say than they could manage at the time.
Questions.
- Is it too soon to ask people?
- Many families wait weeks or months, and there is no hurry. People often find it easier once the funeral has passed, and will write far more than they could have said on the day.
- Can people who could not attend contribute?
- Yes, and they are often the ones with the most to add. Anybody you send the link to can write, wherever they are.
- Can we keep it private to the family and their friends?
- Yes. A collection is only visible to the people you invite.
- Can it be printed?
- Yes. Families often want something on a shelf rather than a page on a website, and the finished story can become a printed book.
Condolences are for the family. Memories are for the person.
When you are ready, ask the people who knew them what they knew.
Start a memorial collection