Enhancing

Having registered your Brief Profile you may want to move straight on to enhancing it or perhaps wait.  Our Enhance the Profile form, below, is just as simple.  But we’re here at theteam@milestonesscotland.co.uk to help whichever your choice.

For simplicity’s sake we use ‘tributes’ to cover everything you can add to the Brief Profile which could be of interest to future researchers. You can register more than one enhancing entry at a time and there is still no charge.* In FAQ you will find examples of eulogies, obituaries and appreciations. We enourage timelines and classic photographs to accompany these. The form also allows for notices and what we have called ‘agreed content.’

More on Tributes

The Eulogy is the most immediate form of tribute, being the address at a funeral or memorial service. The print media rarely accept them but we at Milestone welcome them. They often prompt Appreciations from family or friends present at, or who were unable to be at, the service.

Appreciations allow family, friends, colleagues of someone they have lost to  pay their respects by contributing their own recollections in remembrance, whether immediately following on the death or later. Additionally, friends, former colleagues or admirers of someone longer gone, not necessarily a relative, may register Appreciations, choosing perhaps a date of significance to both to do so.

Customers share with Milestones the right of editorial control of  the content of Appreciations.  This is to protect the good names of both the subject and the site. Our  protocol on content assists customers and contributors drawing up Appreciations.  Moderators from the team are ready to assist. Find them at theteam@milestonesscotland.co.uk.

The Obituary, often based on the eulogy, is usually more reflective and detailed, expanding on the content of the short life summary you gave us for the Brief Profile. We urge customers submitting an obituary to precede it by a Timeline of the principal events in their subject’s lifetime. Generational photographs are encouraged in Timelines.

The timeline, obituary and appreciations are the elements of the profile most useful for the researchers of the future. It is principally through them that we aim to achieve our objective of building milestonesscotland.co.uk into an accepted, popular and reliable source of information for general, biographical and family research.

 Notices

The Death Notice is likely to have been carefully composed with the assistance of your funeral director. It may have been placed in your local newspaper and in local shops. We readily display it, given that it often contains references to the surviving relatives which will be of interest to family researchers of the future.

The Order of Service too will have exercised the family’s recall, patience and, very likely, capacity to compromise. If you wish we will display all or parts of it in the Profile.It may be the source of the photograph you chose to accompany the short life summary.

Acknowledgements of thanks to those who were particularly involved helping the family at the time of their bereavement, which also feature in local newspapers, are welcome too.

A proviso for these Notices is this – while they are likely to exist in a format akin to photographs and will thus be acceptable, it would be wise to check the Protocol.

Agreed Content

An Invitation to submit Appreciations is standard with Brief Profiles. But later you may want to substitute a customised version, for instance, to attract appreciations or photographs from a particular source or sources. This can be done to your requirements. See Invitations| Timelines in the Quick Links sidebar.

A Postcript, if desired, is adjusted between us to round off the Profile. We encourage it for the sake of future researchers.  You may wish to use  your postscript to try to re-establish contact with distant or lost family, old friends or former colleagues.

As the name indicates these entries are a matter of agreement reached between you and Milestones. The text suggested by you in the form can be adjusted in an exchange of emails with theteam@milestonesscotland.co.uk.

If you have any questions please send them to contact@milestonesscotland.co.uk. or to  the team.Your question, anonymised, may be used in FAQ.

* That said we hope that donations will be forthcoming. See Funding the Project.