How to Digitally Preserve Your Loved One’s Life and Memories

When creating and documenting the legacy and lived experience of your loved one, there are many different ways to go about curating and sharing their life. We hope this article outlines a few of the options available to your family and the benefit of starting the process early alongside your elderly loved ones.

Preserving the life of an older family member or friend can be a large undertaking, and it’s undeniable that using technology is the best way to ensure that their memories and stories are available and easily accessible for generations to come. 

Design and Dedicate a Website

One of the most common and free ways to create this digital catalog is by creating and designing a website dedicated to your loved one. There are multiple free and easy-to-use website builders, with preloaded templates and layouts that can help guide you through creating the most authentic and thorough website possible. This option is the most user-friendly way to document your loved one’s life and allows you to upload and customize images, videos, documents, and anything else your family chooses to represent the precious lifetime and memories. Creating a website may also be the best option for your family because as soon as you publish the site it is active unless you choose to delete it, and it’s easy to edit down the road and share widely with family, friends, and anyone else who was important to your loved one. 

Video Diary

As an alternative option, or as a way to add more depth to your website, your family can create a video diary dedicated to your loved one. There is a lot of creative freedom available when creating the diary, and this project is a great way to connect with your loved one during their life by having them share their own stories and memories and recording them to share with your entire family. Documenting your loved one’s life can start long before they pass, and a more intimate, home-movie form of preservation may be the perfect fit for your family’s documentation. A video diary is a very broad format for preservation, so you could choose to edit together videos from different points throughout your loved one’s life or even mix together their own account of their life with well wishes and memories from other family members. The video format can also be a more creative way to involve multiple people in the creation of the preservation project, and makes a great addition to a website catalog if you choose to use both ideas. 

Digitize and Upload

The final form of preservation is collecting and possibly digitizing all images and letters or other pieces of writing from your loved one. So many people throughout their life, especially at an older age, choose to reflect back on their life in the form of journaling and letters. We have written on the benefits of writing down your life as an older person, which can be viewed here. Frequently happens when grieving loved ones and sorting through their possessions is a discovery of photos and diaries and creative writings that they maintained into their later life, and combining these written and visual memories can be so crucial to the healing process. Collecting the writings and images left behind that tell the life story of your loved one also ensures your family has a physical anthology to return to when missing your loved one and allows you to share those memories and stories with other generations. This preservation collection can include recipes, diary entries, letters or birthday cards, short stories, printed-out emails and text messages, and anything else sentimental and tangible that can be gathered into this collection. 

There are so many ways that your family and friends can choose to preserve the lifetime of your loved one, whether it’s a project started during life or after their passing. Creating and publishing a website dedicated to them is a fantastic way to consolidate all of your memories and their stories, and you can also create a video diary of sorts with recordings from family and friends or their own narration of life. These more technological options may not be right for every family, and a very common and healing form of preservation is the creation of a physical collection of your loved one’s photos, writings, and any other sentimental additions. This could additionally be digitized to ensure its survival and make it easy to share. 

Whether your family chooses to physically or digitally preserve the life and legacy of your loved one, we here at Peacefully hope that this guide helps you to hold on to the precious memories that they left you with.

— K. Chandler