Families’ heartache as online bereavement service closes

♦grieving relatives have been left distraught by disclosures that an online memorial service is on the verge of shutting down, meaning tributes and pictures of 140,000 people could be lost.

The website, Gone Too Soon, which has been visited by 33million people

and contains photos, poems, messages of condolence and memories of the dearly departed, will close today, when the bill for hosting the site will no longer be paid.

Many people are already complaining that their data on tribute pages they set up has been lost or corrupted and that they

have been unable to save their photographs and content.

Anne Hurworth started a memorial in 2011 and lost her data several weeks ago. “I’m devastated,” she wrote.

Gone Too Soon was founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Terry George, who sold the site, and it has

been taken over by another memorial website and registered charity, Much Loved.

Jonathan Davies, the charity’s founder, said: “It is a massive part of people’s bereavement [process]. We would have loved to offer some sort of automatic transfer but we couldn’t.”