What to Put on a Memorial Page

Start with a name, a handful of photographs and three or four sentences about who they were. Then add their voice, a song, a timeline of the dates that mattered and the small habits people remember. A memorial page is never finished, so it does not have to be finished today.

Updated July 27, 2026 · Written and checked by the Lumestone team

Most advice you will find under this heading is really obituary advice: how to write two hundred words for a newspaper, with the survived-by list and the service times. A memorial page is a different thing. It has no word limit, no deadline, and no editor, which is exactly what makes it hard to start. Nobody writes for the person sitting in front of a blank page at eleven at night.

So here is a practical answer, section by section, with example wording you can copy and adapt. The examples are all about an invented woman named Margaret Ellison, born 1941, died 2024. She is not a real customer and none of this is a testimonial. She exists only so you can see the shape of a sentence and borrow it. If you would rather see a finished page than read about one, there is a sample memorial you can look through.

One thing before the sections. You do not have to do this in order, and you do not have to do it all now. Grief and admin are a bad combination, and a page with a name, one photograph and four honest sentences is already worth having.

How much is enough

Enough is the point at which a stranger who scanned the code by chance would come away feeling they had met someone. That is a lower bar than most families set for themselves, and it is reachable in an evening. Everything past it is a gift to whoever comes looking in forty years.

Here is a planning table you can work through in any order. The lengths are guidance rather than rules, and every one of them can be revised later.

If you want the mechanics of setting all this up, our guide to creating a memorial code covers the steps in order.

Photos: how many and which ones

Aim for fifteen to forty at first, spread across a whole life rather than clustered in the last decade. Families tend to over-select from recent years because those photographs are on a phone and easy to reach, and the older ones are in a box in the garage. The box is where the good ones are.

Prefer candid over posed. A picture of someone laughing at something outside the frame tells you more than a studio portrait ever will. Include a few where they are not the subject at all, just present: in the background of a christening, holding a ladder, halfway out of shot at a barbecue. Include their handwriting if you have any, a recipe card or the inside cover of a book. Photograph it on a plain table with the light from a window.

Scan the old prints rather than photographing them at an angle, if you have a flatbed handy, and upload everything at full size. Storage is not the constraint. Regret is.

Two photographs deserve special attention. The first is the cover image, which is the face everyone will carry away, and it should be the one that looks like them rather than the one where they look their best. Families often reach for a formal portrait and then quietly replace it a month later with a blurry kitchen photo, because the blurry one is right. The second is the last good picture, which is usually harder to look at now than it will be in ten years. Put it on the page anyway, further down.

The life story, and what to do if you freeze

Write it as though you were telling someone about her at a kitchen table, not as though you were writing a citation. Plain sentences. Real place names. The specific job, not "worked in healthcare." You are allowed to say she was difficult in the mornings.

Example: "Margaret was born in Duluth in the winter of 1941, the second of four, and she stayed a Midwesterner in every way that counted even after forty years in Oregon. She trained as a nurse and worked nights on the surgical floor for twenty-two years, which is where she met Ray, who had turned up with a broken wrist and no convincing explanation for it. They married in 1966 and had three children in five years, which she described afterward as poor planning and excellent luck. She grew tomatoes badly and roses well. She was the person the whole street called when something went wrong at two in the morning, and she never once made anybody feel foolish for calling."

That is 130 words and it does more work than a page of tribute language. If you sit down and nothing comes, do not write the story. Answer these instead, one line each, and stitch the answers together afterward.

• Where were they born, and what was the house like?
• What did they do for work, and what were they genuinely good at?
• Who did they love, and how did the two of them meet?
• What did a Saturday look like?
• What made them laugh, and what did they find unbearable?
• What did they worry about?
• What is one thing they taught you that you still do?
• If they walked in right now, what is the first thing they would say?

Answer eight of those honestly and you have a life story. You can write it in the third person or address them directly. Both read well. Mixing the two does not.

The life line: dates that mattered

A timeline does the structural work so your prose does not have to. It also gives distant relatives and future generations something to orient themselves by, and it is the section people add to most often over the years, because a date is easy to remember when a paragraph is not.

Keep the entries short and let a few of them be unimportant. A life made only of weddings and funerals reads like a form.

Example entries: "1941 — Born in Duluth, Minnesota." "1959 — Started nursing training, mostly to get out of the house." "1966 — Married Ray at St. Anne's, in a borrowed dress." "1971 — The three children are now complete and outnumber the adults." "1978 — Moved to Oregon for Ray's work. Complained about the rain for forty-six years." "1994 — Retired from the surgical floor. The staff gave her a cake shaped like a bedpan." "2011 — First grandchild, Ellie." "2024 — Died at home, with the radio on."

Their voice, and why 30 seconds beats everything

If you take one thing from this page, take this. Voice is the first thing memory loses. Faces stay with you for decades because photographs keep refreshing them, but the exact pitch and rhythm of how somebody said your name fades within a few years, and no photograph brings it back. Thirty seconds of ordinary recorded speech is worth more than every other section here combined.

You almost certainly have some and do not know it. Look in saved voicemails, in the audio of old home videos and phone videos where they are talking off-camera, in wedding and christening footage, in recorded video calls, in an answering machine tape, in a church or club recording. It does not need to be a speech. A voicemail about a dentist appointment is perfect, because that is what they actually sounded like.

If the person is still living and you are reading this while planning ahead, record something now. Do not announce it as a memorial recording. Ask them to tell you the story about the car, or how they met, and let it run for five minutes. Example prompt: "Tell me about the house in Duluth. What was the kitchen like." That question has never once produced a short answer.

Their song

One track, set to play on the page. It does more than you would expect, because a song sets the emotional temperature of the whole memorial before anyone has read a word, and it protects the page from feeling like a document.

Choose the one they actually liked, not the one that suits a funeral. If she sang along badly to something on the radio for fifty years, that is the song, even if it is undignified. A short line of context helps visitors understand why it is there.

Example: "Moon River, which she sang loudly and inaccurately while cooking, and which we are told Ray proposed to her during, though he denies it."

Small details that outlive grand statements

"She will be greatly missed" tells a stranger nothing. "She took her coffee black with one sugar and complained about it every single time" tells them everything. Specifics are what people recognize a person by, and they are what makes a grandchild who never met her laugh out loud in 2060.

Write ten short lines. They do not need to connect to each other, and the smaller they are, the better they work.

Examples: "Called everyone under fifty kiddo, including the doctor." "Kept butter out of the fridge and would argue about it." "Could not pass a dog without stopping." "Said well now before delivering bad news, so we all learned to brace at well now." "Wrote the year on the back of every photograph in pencil, which is why this page exists." "Hated being photographed, which explains the shortage above." "Always had a pack of tissues, and they were always ancient."

If you are wondering how any of this reaches a visitor at the graveside, that is the job of the plaque itself, covered in our guide to codes on headstones.

Inviting family to contribute

Most families ask badly, and get nothing back. "Please add your memories to Mom's page" is too big a request. People stare at it, feel guilty, and close the message. Ask one narrow question instead and you will get answers within the hour.

Example message: "I have started a page for Mom. There is a link below. I am not asking for a eulogy. Could you send me one thing she said to you that you still hear in her voice, even if it is silly. I will add it. If you have any photos from before 1980, those are the ones we are short of."

Send it to one person at a time rather than as a group message, and name the thing you want from each of them: her sister will have the childhood material, her colleague will have the working years, the neighbor will have the ordinary Tuesdays. You can also add relatives as managers so they can post directly, which matters more than it sounds, because a memorial with only one keyholder is a memorial with a single point of failure. Our page on what happens when memorial sites shut down explains why we push families on that point.

What to leave off, and public versus private

A public page attached to a headstone can be opened by anybody standing in the cemetery, which is a feature and occasionally a problem. Funeral.com advises families to keep full home addresses, private phone numbers, children's schools and family schedules off publicly scannable memorial pages for exactly that reason, and notes the Federal Trade Commission's warning that malicious codes can lead to spoofed sites built to steal information. (funeral.com) The FTC's own consumer alert, published in December 2023, tells people to check the address before opening a scanned link and never to enter passwords or payment details through one. (FTC)

Beyond that, leave off anything that is still somebody else's business: a living person's medical history, financial details, family disputes, and mother's maiden name, which is still a security question at more banks than it should be. Naming living grandchildren is a judgment call, and the safer version is first names only, or no names for anyone under eighteen.

A private page is the answer if the family wants to speak freely. It stays behind a link you share, so the writing can be as frank as you like without being readable from the cemetery gate. Public pages suit people who had large lives and wide circles, where a stranger scanning the code is a welcome outcome rather than an intrusion. You can start private while the page is unfinished and open it up later, which is what most families do.

Last, keep it alive. Add a photograph each year on the anniversary. Add new grandchildren as they arrive, with their names written alongside hers, because the whole reason a page like this beats a stone is that a stone cannot be added to. When somebody says something at Christmas that sounds exactly like her, put it on the page that week rather than trusting yourself to remember it in March.

Set yourself one small recurring occasion rather than a resolution to keep it updated, which nobody keeps. Her birthday works better than the date she died, because more of the family will be thinking of her and fewer of them will be sad. A memorial that gets touched once a year for twenty years outlives one that was finished perfectly in a fortnight and never opened again. If you would like the physical half of it, the plaque takes about a minute to fit and needs nothing from you afterward.

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