Follow Friday: Memory Medallion, Stories in Stone, and Lifetime Lookback

It’s Follow Friday and today I recommend three websites that are using QR codes to bring cemeteries into the 21st century. Enjoy!

Memory Medallion, a company started by Glenn Toothman, III in 2011, creates medallion Quick Response (QR) codes that install on tombstones and memorials. These stainless steel medallions give families an opportunity to create lasting multi-media remembrances about their love ones! So how does the Memory Medallion work? Upon purchasing a medallion, an account is a setup for you to create your loved one’s story with text, images, video, and links to your family tree. This information may be edited as often as you like and all changes are updated immediately to the medallion. Visitors to the grave site can scan the medallion’s QR code with their smartphones to connect to the story. Those without smartphones may take a picture of the QR code to access later from their PCs.

Quiring is a Seattle-based company that creates burial markers that include a scannable, stamp-like image called a “quick read” — or QR code. The codes can be placed on tombstones so visitors can learn more about the dearly departed, leave messages for their loved ones, and record stories for others who may visit. And all you need is a smartphone and a free app to make it work.

Lifetime Lookback, a Burlington, Kentucky company, offers weatherproof Tribute Tags™ that have both a QR code and URL that direct visitors at grave sites to customized Tribute Pages™.  This company charges a “one-time” $129 activation fee which gives families unlimited access to modify, re-create or append the Tribute Pages™ as often as they like. Visitors to the grave site can access Lifetime Lookback Tribute Pages™ with any type of Internet access they have on their mobile device. In short, cell phones, iPads, and tablets can “become a portal to the past!”