Organisations

For a community that remembers its own

A plaque holds a name. It cannot hold a voice, a photograph, or how someone actually was as a person.

As an institution or company, you keep a list of people who should not be forgotten. You are the most capable to tell the world who they really were.

Who this is for

Funeral homes, hospices and parishes. Town halls, museums and archives. Schools and universities. Veterans' and survivors' associations, fire and mountain rescue services, sports clubs, patient associations, cultural and diaspora societies, and villages that are emptying out.

In a village that is emptying out, the memory goes faster than the people. The ones who still know who everyone was are the oldest left; the children and grandchildren live in another city or another country and were never told. When a house is finally cleared, the photographs, the letters and the albums are thrown out, because there is no one nearby who wants them. What stays written down is a name and two dates.

What this asks of you

Not money, and not work.

Two things you already have: the names, and the standing to ask. A letter from a parish, a hospice, a school or a town hall gets opened. The same letter from us does not.

How it works

1. 1.You give the families you know a partner code from us. That code is yours, it never expires, and it will work tomorrow, next year, in ten years. Whoever creates a memorial page with it comes to us through you — and the first page a family creates carries a fee back to you. There is no software to learn and no account to create. One short form to begin, and nothing after that.
2. 2.You pass the code on however you already reach people — at the office, after a service, in the letter you were sending anyway. It could also come as a printed sheet with a QR code you can put up where people wait and see it. Someone points their phone at it and lands on Stella Memoria with your code already applied.
3. 3.The family builds the page. The photographs, the stories, a recording of the voice. An evening's work, and they can keep adding to it for the rest of their lives. Once a month we tell you how many pages were made under your code.

When there is no one left

Some names have outlived everyone who knew them. The veteran with no descendants. The patient who died alone. The name on a monument nobody visits any more, and which could one day be the subject of a future historian's doctoral thesis.

There, you are the custodian of what is left of their memory — so you can write those pages yourself. You already have what is needed: the record, the data, and the photo in the file, what the older staff remembers. You can write as you would for the register, adding what they could have told the world if they had had the time and a word to say. And we preserve it, because memory is the backbone of a community.