Privacy and care
Your memories are treated with respect
This page explains, in plain language, what happens to a tribute, story, or photograph once you share it here: who can see it, how long it is kept, and how to ask for it to be taken down. It also explains what happens if you write to say you are coming to the service, and what to do if you appear in a recording the family has added. If anything here worries you, the family would far rather hear from you than not.
What is collected
When someone submits a tribute, story, or photograph, the memorial stores the contribution, the chosen public attribution, relationship, private email address, and uploaded files.
Submitting also puts a random identifier in your browser and sends it along with the submission. It is not a name, an account, or a tracker sold to anyone: it holds your photographs together with the words you sent them with, and it is what limits how often one browser can submit. Clearing your browser data removes it from your browser.
Family review
Nothing you send appears on the memorial by itself. Every contribution arrives private and stays private until a family administrator approves it, and the only accounts that can approve anything are the ones on the family’s own named list. There is no other route onto this memorial — not for a visitor, and not for whoever wrote the contribution. Contributions that are not approved are never displayed.
Email addresses
Contributor email addresses are visible only inside the protected family review area. They are never shown on the public memorial and should be used only when the family needs to clarify a submission or respond to a concern.
Photographs and consent
Contributors must confirm that they have permission to share their submission and the people shown in any photographs. The family may remove a photograph or story if consent is disputed.
Letting the family know you are coming
While the service details are published and the service is still to come, this memorial also carries a form for telling the family you will be there. It asks for your name, an email address, how many people are coming, and an optional note; it records when the reply arrived, and it stores nothing else. Until the family publishes the arrangements there is no such form, and nothing of this is collected at all. Once the service has taken place the form is gone from the page and the memorial refuses replies outright, so nothing further is collected after that day; the replies already sent are kept and then cleared exactly as described below.
A reply is not a tribute, and the difference is worth being exact about, because the section above about family review does not apply to it. A tribute is sent in order to be published, and waits for a family administrator to approve it. A reply is never published — not your name, not the number coming, not a total, not at any threshold — and there is no approval step, because there is nothing to approve. It goes straight into the same protected family area that contributor email addresses go to, and only the family’s own named accounts can open it.
Recordings of gatherings
The memorial may show video of a service or gathering held in his memory. A recording like that is added by the family rather than submitted through this page, and the people in it — mourners, whoever spoke, whoever was simply sitting nearby — were never asked. Putting it here is the family’s decision, and that is not the same thing as consent from everyone who appears in it.
If you are in a recording and would rather not be, please write to the family at the address below. The answer they can always give is that the whole recording comes down; they may instead be able to put up a version edited so that you are not in it, but there is no way to hide one person in a video that otherwise stays as it is. Taking a recording down is more final than taking a tribute down: the file is deleted from the memorial and from the service that stores it, and no private copy is kept. Until someone asks, a recording stays for as long as the memorial does.
Links to other websites
If the family have set up a fundraiser for his children, the memorial carries a single link to it. It is one of two links here that send you to another website; the other, in the service arrangements, goes to the parish’s YouTube channel, where the service is streamed. No part of GoFundMe or YouTube runs on this page — no script, no widget, no embedded panel — for the same reason a recording here is played from the memorial’s own files rather than borrowed from a video site: someone who came to read about him should not have a company’s code running while they do. Both links are also set so that neither GoFundMe nor YouTube is told which page you arrived from. And the family cannot see who followed either: nothing here records the click, and there is no counter sitting behind them. Giving is then between you and GoFundMe — what they show the person who set the fundraiser up is settled at their end, not this one, and the family would rather say so than let the sentence before it be read as a promise about that.
Retention and removal
Contributions are kept indefinitely. That is what the memorial is for: it is meant to stay, so that the people who loved him can come back to it years from now. Contributions that are never published are kept as well, in the same private review area, and are not shown to anyone outside the family.
A reply about the gathering is not one of those. It is not part of the memorial — it is arrangements for a single afternoon — and it is not kept on the same promise. Replies are cleared automatically 90 days after they arrive, whether or not anybody asks; a family administrator can remove one sooner, and you can ask for yours to be removed at any time by writing to the address below. For a reply there is only one outcome and it is the permanent one — the record is deleted outright, with the name, the email address, the number coming and the note. There is no take-it-down-but-keep-it version, because a reply was never up.
One caveat about that, which the family would rather state than have you assume from the paragraph above: when you send a reply, your email address is also held on its own in the count that limits how often one address can reply. That count is a separate record from the reply. Removing the reply clears it too, and if nobody removes anything it clears itself within a day or so of your last attempt — once the day is up it is holding no limit any more, only the address, so the next sweep takes it. What that record holds is the address and a tally of recent attempts, and nothing else: not your name, not the number coming, not the note.
You can ask for your own contribution to be taken down at any time, and the family will do that. There are two things they can do and the difference is worth knowing. Taking it down removes it from the memorial: nothing of it is displayed any more, and the submission itself stays in the family’s review area. Deleting it outright removes the record — the words, your email address, and any photograph files are deleted from the memorial and from the service that stores them, and nothing is kept back. If you want the second one, say so in your message; it is permanent, and it is the only one of the two that removes the files.
About photographs specifically, because it is ordinary for a public website and the family would rather say it than let you assume otherwise: while a photograph is published here, its file has a web address of its own, and anyone holding that address can open the file directly. Taking a photograph down stops it being shown, but it cannot reach back to a copy or a link somebody already saved. Deleting it outright is what makes the file stop answering, and even that can take up to four hours to pass through the caches in between. Nothing here can undo a copy already on someone else’s computer, and no website can promise otherwise.
Report a concern
If something on this memorial should not be public — a privacy concern, something inaccurate, a question of copyright, a photograph shared without the permission of someone in it, or a recording you appear in — please write to the family:
It helps to say which contribution you mean and, if it is your own, the name it was published under. These messages are read by the family rather than by an automated system, so a reply may take a little time; requests to take something down are dealt with first.