The blank page is the hardest part of this. You have a lifetime to describe and a text box, and the gap between the two is enough to make most people close the laptop and try again another day. Some never do.
So here is a structure, and permission to ignore most of it.
Start with five things, not fifty
The single biggest reason memorial pages sit empty is that people wait until they can do it properly. Properly never arrives.
Put up five things this week: one photograph, their name as people said it, the two dates, one sentence about who they were, and one story. That is a real memorial page. Everything else is addition, and additions are easy in a way that beginnings are not.
Photographs
The instinct is to choose the good ones. The posed one from the wedding, the professional one from work, the one where the light was right.
Choose the ordinary ones instead. Him asleep in the chair with the paper over his face. Her laughing at something out of frame. The blurry one from the kitchen at Christmas. These are the pictures that make people who knew them exclaim out loud, because they show the person rather than the occasion.
Practical points that matter more than photographic quality:
- Caption everything. A photograph with "Skegness, 1974, the year the tent blew away" underneath is worth ten uncaptioned ones. In thirty years the captions will be the only thing keeping the pictures meaningful.
- Name the other people in the frame. Grandchildren will not know who anyone is otherwise, and there will come a point when nobody left can tell them.
- Scan the old prints. A phone photograph of a print, taken flat in daylight without flash, is perfectly good enough. Do not wait for a scanner.
- Twenty good ones beat two hundred. Nobody scrolls through two hundred, including the family.
The ordinary details, which are the whole point
Obituaries record achievements. Almost nobody misses achievements.
What people actually miss is how he answered the phone. The exact way she said your name when she was pleased with you. That he put ketchup on everything including things that should not have ketchup on them. Her habit of narrating the television. The specific tuneless whistle from the garage that meant he was in a good mood.
Write those down. They feel too trivial to record, which is precisely why they get lost, and they are the details that will make someone cry with recognition in fifteen years. A page of them is worth more than a page of employment history.
A prompt that works when nothing else does: what would they have said about this? Then write down what they would have said, in their words.
Voice and video
The most valuable thing you can possibly put on a memorial page, and the most commonly overlooked.
People forget faces slowly. They forget voices quickly, and the loss of a voice is one of the sharpest secondary griefs there is. A thirty-second clip of them saying something unremarkable is worth more, over decades, than any photograph.
Look in places you would not think to look:
- Saved voicemails, including on old handsets in drawers
- Background audio in family videos where they are not the subject but are talking off camera
- Wedding and party recordings, including other people's
- Video calls that were recorded
- Answerphone greetings
Ask the wider family. Somebody has one. If you find nothing else, that search alone is worth doing before phones are wiped and old devices are thrown out.
Do not write an obituary
The formal register that funeral notices use is not how anybody speaks and not how anyone will want to read about someone they loved.
Write it as though telling a friend about them. Anecdotes rather than summary. "He was a devoted family man" tells a reader nothing. "He drove four hours to fix a tap and refused a cup of tea because he did not want to be any trouble" tells them everything, including that he was a devoted family man.
Specific beats general, always. One story beats five adjectives.
Let other people in
This is the difference between a page and a memorial.
You know your version of them. Their colleagues knew a person you never met. Their friends from before you existed knew someone else again. Their neighbours have stories from ordinary Tuesdays that nobody in the family ever heard.
Ask for one memory each, from as many people as you can reach. What comes back is consistently described by families as the most unexpected gift of the whole process, because it enlarges the person rather than merely preserving them.
The awkward part is the asking, and the mechanism matters more than you would think. A group message gets a handful of replies. Something physical, handed to somebody at a funeral, gets far more, which is why memory cards exist. Either way, ask a specific question. "Tell me a memory" is paralysing. "What is something he did that was completely typical of him?" gets answers.
What to leave off
The security answers. This is the section nobody expects and it genuinely matters. Memorial pages are a known source for identity fraud, because the deceased's accounts are often not closed for months. A page giving full date of birth, mother's maiden name, place of birth, first school, first pet's name and last address is a completed security questionnaire, published openly.
Use years rather than full dates where you can. Leave off the home address entirely. Be careful with mother's maiden name, which is the classic memorial-page overshare. There is more detail in our guide to memorial page privacy.
The circumstances of the death, unless the family has actively decided otherwise. It is the least important fact about a person and it becomes the headline if you include it. This applies with particular force where the death was sudden, or by suicide, or where children will read the page.
Anything contested. Estrangements, second marriages, disagreements about the will. A memorial page is not the venue and it will not settle it.
Anything you would not want a ten-year-old to read. They will. Probably a grandchild, probably alone, probably at an age you did not anticipate.
Privacy
Most people want one of three settings, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
- Open. Anyone who scans can read. Right for a bench or a public memorial, where the whole point is that a stranger becomes curious.
- Unlisted. Reachable by the code but not indexed by search engines. A sensible default for most families.
- Private. Password or invitation only. Right where there are safeguarding concerns, or where a family simply wants it kept close.
Consider separating reading from contributing. A page where anyone can read but only approved people can add is the arrangement that causes fewest problems over time.
Make it usable by the people who will use it
A significant proportion of the audience for a memorial page is over seventy. Large text, obvious controls, no requirement to create an account, and no app to install. If your aunt cannot get into it on her iPad without ringing you, it does not work, however good the content is.
Giving it somewhere to live
A page on its own is findable only by people who already have the link. What makes it a memorial rather than a folder is something physical, in the place people actually go.
That is what our memorial plaque with memory page does. It is £79.99, in 50mm and 80mm, in brushed steel, matte black or antique brass, and it fixes to a headstone, a bench, an urn or the back of a picture frame. The page is the content. The plaque is how anyone finds it.
Keep a copy that does not depend on anyone
Whatever service holds the page, including ours, download everything periodically and keep it somewhere you control. Photographs as files, text as a document, audio as audio.
This is not pessimism about any particular company. It is that a memorial is measured in generations and companies are measured in years. We go into this properly in how memorial QR codes work.
Printing it is the other half of the same insurance, and it is the version the family will actually pick up. A printed memory book requires no electricity, no company and no internet, and it is what sits on the shelf and gets opened at Christmas.
If you cannot face it
That is not avoidance and it is not a character flaw. Sitting down with a box of photographs in the first months is genuinely more than a great many people can do, and being told it will be therapeutic does not help.
You can leave it. The page will still be there in a year. A great many families do it around the first anniversary, when the acute phase has passed and there is something left to do it with.
Or you can hand it over. Send us what you have, in whatever state it is in, and we will build it for you. You can change every word of it later, when you are ready, or never.