By:   Michael Putzel
3/12/2002

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web, with its instant communications and practically limitless storage capacity, is giving rise to a new form of memorial, one that may last longer than marble and be reached without leaving the house.

The online obituary is changing the age-old death announcement from a briefly noted farewell in a newspaper to an enduring, multifaceted memorial. At a time when personalization has become a byword in funeral service, the Web offers a never-before opportunity to personalize and extend the traditional, fleeting death notice.

Jeannette Bacs of Virginia Beach, Va., told the Virginian-Pilot recently that putting an obituary of her son Andy online "was one of the best things that could have happened" at a terribly difficult time. Bacs said she received 63 online tributes to her son from cousins, soccer teammates and bar buddies across the world. Messages came from Ohio; Pennsylvania, Pakistan and Transylvania. She even got one from her next-door neighbors.

"Had it not been for e-mail, many of these persons would not have gotten a call through to send us their condolences," she told the local paper. "You just don't know who's out there whose life this is going to touch."

Not only is an online memorial immediately accessible anywhere in the world, but the graphical and interactive character of the Web makes it easy to build detailed, colorfully illustrated memorials to which visitors can attach their own tributes and mementos, enriching the obituary itself with touching memories, stories and snapshots.

The most popular part of many Web obits is the online guest book, an electronic register book that visitors to the site can sign with an expression of condolence that the family can read at its convenience. When the National Obituary Archive put up a guest book as part of its memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks, more than 2,100 people added their names and notes of sympathy.


Unlike real estate or physical memorials that tend to increase in price with inflation, the cost of erecting and preserving online memorials has declined dramatically as technology prices have plunged in recent years.

Hundreds of funeral homes now have their own Web sites, and many are finding that posting their obituaries there is welcomed by family and friends, who come to the site for service information, then stay to learn more about the funeral home and its offerings.

John Butler, general manager of Altmeyer Funeral Homes in Virginia, said he has found in the year since launching the funeral homes' Web site that the obituaries serve as memorials that bring people back long after the service.

"I had someone come in just yesterday with another photo he wanted to put up on the site, and that was some time after the funeral," Butler said. "A lot of people come back and visit it, then come back and re-do some of the photos."

Looking at his statistics from the site's launch in January 2001 until the end of January this year, Butler said the Altmeyer homes in Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio posted 862 obituaries in their first 13 months and attracted 109,021 individual visitors to the memorial section of their Web site. In January 2002 alone, he said, the section had 14,919 visitors.

Predictably, one of the most popular features is individual the guest book attached to each obituary. More than 2,200 people have used the feature to send their condolences.

The trend toward cremation also favors the use of online memorials. As more and more Americans forego traditional burial and gravestones, an online obituary serves as an attractive, environmentally friendly way to place a lasting memorial in cyberspace. Just because people decide they don't want a physical plot or stone does not mean they wish to be forgotten.

In fact, preserving memories and sharing them with those who come after us are what drives family historians and genealogists, who make up one of the most active and dedicated communities on the Web.

The ability to store huge numbers of records in permanent, electronic archives and search them in seconds makes Web-based obituary services a treasure trove for genealogists and amateur historians who otherwise might spend days or weeks plowing through microfilm in public libraries.
Most funeral directors know the plight of determined family researchers who go to great lengths to track down clues to their ancestry. That search becomes easier with the publication of every new obituary or death record on the Web. The National Obituary Archive alone now contains more than 55 million death records, all searchable not just by name but by city, date of death and numerous other criteria. Other sites use special Web-crawling software to search newspaper Web sites and index the death notices by name.

As Americans increasingly leave their ancestral homes, with children moving away to go to school or work and retirees seeking new, warmer climes for their leisure years, fewer and fewer people live within the circulation area of their hometown paper. A Census Bureau study based on the 1990 census concluded that less than half of all Americans still live in the area where they were born. That makes it more difficult to reach family and friends by publishing an obit in the local paper, and the trends don't appear to favor newspapers.

With the arrival of broadcasting, particularly television, newspaper circulation and readership began a long and apparently inexorable decline. Daily newspaper circulation peaked at 62.8 million in the 1980s and has drifted steadily downward to 56 million in 1999, according to figures compiled by the industry itself. Falling readership is even more dramatic. In 1964, more than 80 percent of adult men and women in the United States read their daily newspaper on weekdays. By 1997, that figure had fallen to 58.3 percent, and the number of women reading a daily newspaper was down to a mere 53 percent.

The Internet's popularity, meanwhile, continues to grow, despite the bursting of the "dot com" bubble that weeded out many poorly financed or ill-conceived startups, including several that sought to break into the funeral industry. Today 180 million people in the United States have access to the Internet, and the Web audience grew 12 percent in the last year, a sure sign that people are finding valuable information and useful resources at their fingertips. What was a curiosity for the techno elite just a few years ago is now a mainstream medium and destined to become ubiquitous as new technology makes Internet use faster and easier for everyone.

Funeral directors are frequently cited among the groups slow to change and reluctant to adopt new technology, but Butler said his experience has shown it takes only about ten minutes to post an obituary to the funeral home's Web site and perhaps five or ten minutes more to scan and upload the photos.

"The simplicity is surprising," wrote former Pennsylvania funeral director Frank S. Miller, describing his ability to post obituaries to a funeral home Web site. "Log in, go to the funeral notice page, click to add a new listing, paste the informational text, enter the deceased person's name and date of service, log off, and you're finished…It's easy and fast, and it's inexpensive."

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Michael Putzel, a former White House and foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and The Boston Globe is a Vice President of Continental Computer Corp. He writes frequently on how technology is changing the lives of ordinary Americans. He can be reached at mputzel@continentalcomputers.com