A memorial that grows is the aim of a new service on the Internet. Edinburgh publisher Derek Watson set up In Memory-Scotland after finding that he couldn't arrange for a plaque on the crematorium wall for his father similar to the one the family had installed for his mother a few years before.

The alternative, a rose in the rose garden, struck Watson as too seasonal and the more he looked into his problem, the more he realised that it was something more and more people were encountering.

"While crematoriums have tried to increase the choice of memorials available, they are suffering from a lack of space," he says. "And a book of remembrance is limited in that it's usually only open one day a year in one particular place. I thought it would be good if people could access a memorial at any time and from any place in the world, and the Internet seemed the obvious solution."

He surfed the net to see if anyone else was offering the same sort of service and found a few sites in the U.S. but nothing based in Scotland or the rest of the UK. He registered www.inmemory-scotland.com and set about establishing it as a business.

"First we had to consider what people might want to do. As with gravestones, people have different scales in mind and we decided to offer three sizes of memorials ranging from the fairly simple with a photograph and short message to the more elaborate which includes up to eight photographs and a full, 3000 word obituary which will be compiled by a professional writer with the family's approval."

The bonus that a website offers is that with the addition of a guest book, relatives and friends from across the world can add their thoughts, messages and memories of the deceased. This way, says Watson, the memorial can keep growing and younger members of the family can learn more about a relative they may be too young too remember.

Having watched his nieces access their grandmother and grandfather's memorials, Watson has first hand experience of this. "They never knew their grandparents and they took much more interest in finding out about them by using the computer than they would have done through looking through old photograph albums."

Another feature of In Memory-Scotland is that it offers a lasting memorial. The site guarantees ten years availability without further charges. But as long as the cost of web space doesn't become prohibitive, says Watson, he intends to keep the memorials posted for as long as possible.

"It's common practice, with crematoriums, to pay for a memorial for five or ten years," he adds. "We're offering an alternative to that, with round the clock, round the calendar access. Creating a memorial is also something that families might not want to rush into straight away, so if someone died five, ten, twenty years ago - whatever - and they feel they want to post something on the site, the service is open to them."

Setting up the service hasn't been straightforward. Watson has run into difficulties with newspapers, including many local papers and The Scotsman, which refuse to accept advertising because In Memory-Scotland offers an alternative to their lucrative "in memoriam" market. Elsewhere, however, reaction to the idea has been promising. Co-op funeral directors in the east of Scotland are offering In Memory-Scotland as part of the funeral package, and Watson is hopeful of gaining national coverage with the possibility, in time, of expanding into England, Wales and Ireland.

"As a small company we have to take things slowly," he says. "For the moment we're concentrating on Scotland and people with Scottish links. That includes anybody who has associations with Scotland or has worked here. In fact, one of our most recent additions to the site was posted by customers from an Edinburgh bar in memory of a young Australian woman who had worked there. She died in a tragic accent on holiday in Africa and they wanted her friends and family back in Australia to see how much they thought of her. Now several comments and memories of her have been added in the site guest book."

CLOSE WINDOW