What to put on an online memorial page, and what can wait

An obituary usually has to do a different job. It records the facts, announces a death, and tells people what happens next. A memorial page can carry what that leaves out. The way someone answered the phone. The dish they made every December. The advice they repeated until you could finish the sentence yourself.

People arrive at this at different times. Some start in the week after a death, some years later, some while a person is still living. Whenever it is, the same problems show up. The photographs are spread across phones, albums, and old email. Relatives want to help and do not know what to send. And there is a quiet worry about getting it wrong.

An online memorial page can begin with a name, one photograph, a short description, and one detail that sounds unmistakably like the person. Stories, more photographs, voice recordings, service information, and contributions from other people can all come later. None of them are needed to begin.

What to include when you first create a memorial page

A memorial page does not have to be finished to be worth having.

The first version can be four things:

• Their name
• One photograph
• Dates, if your family wants them included
• One sentence about who they were

That last item does more work than it looks like. It is not a summary of someone’s character. It is one specific thing they did.

Marisol always saved the first slice of cake for whoever arrived late.

That sentence gives you an idea of what it felt like to be around her. It says more than “Marisol was generous” because it gives the reader something they can picture.

Write one sentence like that. If nothing comes, choose a photograph and describe what is happening in it.

Add the everyday details an obituary may not include

Many newspapers charge for obituaries by the line or by size, which is part of why they stay short and factual. A memorial page has room for the texture of a life.

These questions tend to lead to more specific answers than “tell me about them”:

• What did they love doing, and what did they love before that?
• How did they spend an ordinary Tuesday?
• What did they say all the time?
• What were they good at that never appeared on a résumé?
• What music, food, places, teams, animals, or objects do people connect with them?
• Which people and groups mattered to them?

Choose the two or three that sound like them. A page does not need to follow a template to feel like the person it is about.

Use photographs to find the stories to write down

Writing about someone you have lost is hard, whether it happened last week or years ago. Choosing a photograph is easier, and photographs usually remind you what to write.

This method keeps it from turning into a sorting project:

1. Choose five photographs from different parts of their life. Not the five best. Five different ones.
2. Write one line under each.
3. Leave dates and names blank where you do not know them.
4. Show the five to someone else and ask what they recognize.

Step four is where the page usually grows. Someone corrects a date, names a person standing in the background, or tells you about that afternoon.

You may spend twenty minutes looking for one photograph and find three unrelated things that stop you where you sit. That is part of it. Put them aside and come back when you can.

Save the context with each photograph

A photograph becomes far more useful when a few words are attached to it.

This is not only sentiment. The Library of Congress, in its guidance on keeping personal digital photographs, tells people to give individual photos descriptive file names and to “tag photos with names of people and descriptive subjects.” Family photographs often outlast the people who can explain them, and archives treat a caption and its source as part of the record rather than decoration.

Where you know them, record:

• Who is in the photograph
• Where it was taken
• Roughly when
• What was happening that day
• Why someone kept it

If you have a photograph but do not know who is in it, start by saving what you do know, then work through how to identify people in old family photos.

Do not stop because you cannot answer all five. “At the lake, probably the late 1980s” is worth much more than a photograph with nothing attached. Someone else may fill in the rest later.

The same guidance is worth following for the originals. The Library of Congress recommends keeping at least two copies, storing them in locations “as physically far apart as practical,” and checking once a year that you can still open them.

How to ask family and friends in a way they can act on

“Send me anything you have” is difficult to act on. People want to help, cannot tell what would be useful, and put it off. Then it feels too late to send anything at all.

Specific questions get answers. Any of these work:

• What did you always notice about them?
• What is a small thing they did that you still remember?
• Do you have a photo from a day you spent together?
• What did they always say?
• What would you want someone who never met them to know?

Ask one person one question. When they answer, ask a different person a different one. A group message can work too, but a specific prompt makes it much easier for someone to reply.

Saying what you plan to do with the answer helps. “I am putting together a page for my father and I want to include the way he talked about his work. Do you have a story about that?” gives someone a place to start.

How to choose public, private, or invite-only access

This is a real decision, and there is no answer that is right for every family.

The common choices:

• A private page for a small group of people you invite
• A page anyone with the link can view, but that does not appear in search results
• A fully public page that can also be found by search engines, if the tool offers that
• A private collection that is never shared widely

Some of what is worth weighing first: living relatives who did not agree to be named, children under 18, home addresses, the circumstances of the death, and family members who disagree about what should be shared. Any one of those is reason enough to keep a page private.

There is also a practical reason to be careful with certain details on a public page. The FBI has warned that scammers target grieving families using information published about the person who died. Its guidance is to give a person’s age and leave out their date of birth, middle name, home address, birthplace, and mother’s maiden name. Those are the standard answers to account security questions, and they are most dangerous in the weeks when nobody is watching a credit file.

None of that means a page has to be private. It means a public page can carry the stories and leave out the identifying details.

Privacy is not a measure of how much you loved someone. A private page for eleven people is not a smaller thing than a public one. Control is not a measure of who loved them most either. It is a practical decision about who can make changes when people disagree.

Before you choose a tool, check two things. Whether you can change visibility later, and whether you can review contributions before they appear on the page. If you are unsure, starting private gives your family time to decide what feels right.

Decide who will manage the page

If several people may want a say, settle early who can edit the page, approve contributions, change privacy settings, invite others, and remove material.

This is not a hypothetical problem. Memorial platforms have written formal rules for handling these disagreements. Find a Grave publishes a relationship hierarchy and transfer process for cases where a non-relative created a memorial or more than one relative wants to manage it. Other services take the opposite approach and say plainly in their terms that they will not mediate between family members at all.

Before choosing a tool, check:

• Who owns the page
• Whether you can add a second editor
• Who can remove stories or photographs
• Whether contributors can edit or delete their own submissions
• What happens if the original owner stops using the account
• How the service handles a request to transfer control

A memorial can hold many people’s memories. That does not mean everyone needs the same editing access.

Ask before you share someone else’s story

A memory can belong to more than one person.

Before adding a story about a living relative, a difficult period, a private joke, or the circumstances of someone’s death, ask the people involved whether they are comfortable seeing it on the page. This matters most when the memorial is public, or when several branches of a family will read it.

You do not have to include every true thing. A memorial can be honest without carrying every detail.

Why a memorial page can grow over time

There is no complete version of a person. Details keep arriving. Someone remembers something at a birthday dinner two years from now, and it belongs on the page as much as anything you write this week.

A small page can hold as much as a large one.

A checklist for the first time you sit down

• Choose one photograph
• Write their name
• Add one ordinary detail about them
• Decide whether the page starts private
• Ask one person one specific question
• Leave the rest for later

That is already a memorial page worth having. Everything after it is addition.

Common questions about online memorial pages

How many photographs should I include?

There is no right number. Start with one to five that show different parts of the person’s life, and add more when you have time.

Should the page be public or private?

Start private if you are unsure. You can invite a small group first and open it up later if that feels right. Going the other direction is harder, because anything already public may have been seen or saved.

Can family members add their own memories?

Many memorial tools let invited people add stories, photographs, or messages. Before choosing one, check whether you can review contributions before they appear.

Do I need to write a full biography?

No. A name, a photograph, and one specific detail are enough to begin. A longer life story can come later, if your family wants one.

What happens if the service I use shuts down?

This is worth asking before you upload anything. Ask whether you can download a complete copy of the photographs and writing, in ordinary files you can open without that company. The Library of Congress guidance above applies here too. Keep at least two copies of anything you would not want to lose, in separate places, whatever site the page lives on.

Can I change or remove a memorial that someone else created?

It depends entirely on the service, and it is a common enough problem that platforms have written rules for it. Find a Grave, for example, lets close relatives request management of a recent memorial and will step in when an existing manager will not transfer it. Other services state in their terms that they do not take sides in family disputes. Read that section before you invest time in a page someone else controls.

What about their social media accounts?

That is a separate job with its own rules, and some of it is time sensitive. We cover it in what happens to online accounts after someone dies.

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If you want a place to keep these things together, Perdura is one option. You can begin with one photograph and one sentence, keep the page private, and add to it whenever another story comes back to you.