Terms of use

A place to make a memorial page for someone who has died, to put their photographs and their story somewhere lasting, and to let the people who knew them leave something. There is a cemetery you can walk through, and plots in it that a memorial can occupy.

You need an account to make a memorial. You do not need one to read a published memorial.

The person who creates a memorial is its steward. They decide what it says and whether it is published. Until it is published only they can see it; once it is published, anyone can. There is no setting today that publishes a memorial to a family and no further — if it is published, it is public.

A steward can pass stewardship to another account. Families change, and the person who set a memorial up is not always the person who should be looking after it in five years.

It stays yours. Photographs, writing, tributes — you keep whatever rights you had in them. What you give us is permission to store them and to show them on the memorial, which is the only way the site can do anything useful with them. We do not use them for anything else, we do not sell them, and we do not train anything on them.

We ask two things of you. Upload things you are entitled to upload — a photograph belonging to someone else is theirs to share, not yours. And bear in mind that a memorial often names living people, who did not choose to be named. Write about them as you would want to be written about.

Anyone with an account can leave a tribute on a published memorial, and it appears straight away. The steward can hide one from their memorial without giving a reason. What they cannot do is change its words: a tribute is somebody else’s, and the database will not let it be edited by anyone, including us.

We will remove anything cruel, abusive or clearly false. A memorial is not a place for an argument.

Some things cost money: a plot in the cemetery, flowers and other gifts left on a memorial. Payment is taken by Stripe on their own pages; your card details never reach us.

If something has gone wrong with a purchase — charged twice, paid for a plot that never appeared, bought the wrong thing within a day or so — write to us and we will refund it. We would rather sort it out than hold onto money from a family who did not mean to spend it.

You can ask us to draft a biography from notes you write. What comes back is a draft: it sits unpublished until a person reads it and decides to use it. Nothing generated is ever published on a memorial on its own.

It can be wrong. It is produced by a language model from the notes it was given, and it will sometimes state something that is not true. Read it before you publish it. We keep the notes and the model version alongside every draft, so if the text says something strange we can tell you where it came from.

The FamilySearch connection is optional and may stop working. Our access is a beta arrangement, not a commercial one, and it can be withdrawn. If that happens the family-history features go away and the rest of the memorial is unaffected. Nothing you have added to a memorial depends on it.

We take this seriously. The database is backed up every night to storage separate from the site itself, the restore has been performed for real rather than only rehearsed, and the application does not delete photographs — a removed photograph is kept so that a mistake can be undone.

What we do not offer is an uptime guarantee. Burial Cloud is built and run by one engineer. The site will sometimes be down, and a failure could lose up to a day of what was most recently added. We would rather tell you that than imply a reliability we have not bought.

So: please keep your own copies of photographs that matter to you. A memorial should be somewhere they are safe, and it is, and it should not be the only place they exist.

You can stop using Burial Cloud whenever you like. If you want your account closed, write to us and a person will do it — but a steward’s account is attached to a memorial that other people may be relying on, so we will ask you what should happen to the memorial before anything is removed.

We will close an account that is being used to harass people or to post abuse on memorials. We will tell you why.

If we change anything that matters, we will say so here with a new date, and tell stewards by email if it affects their memorials.

Email support@burialcloud.net. If something on this page is unclear, that is our fault rather than yours, and we would like to fix it.