Nobody should vanish completely.
The story behind Eternaflame
In two generations, everyone who ever knew you will be gone. Your children might remember you clearly. Your grandchildren might have photographs, or fragments of stories. But your great-grandchildren? You will be a name, maybe a year — if that.
This is the default ending for almost every human who has ever lived. Not tragedy, not intentional erasure — just time doing what time does. The record closes. The story stops.
Eternaflame exists to make that stop being the end.
The 70%
About 70% of people who die never get a published obituary. Not because their lives didn’t matter — because a newspaper obituary costs $500, and nobody nearby knew how to write one, and the forms were confusing, and life moved fast.
Every memorial platform that exists today starts with an obituary. If you don’t have one, you’re not in the record. You’re invisible.
Eternaflame pulls from public death records, vital statistics, and government registries. We don’t wait for a newspaper to decide someone was worth remembering. Every person gets a place in the record — regardless of income, location, or whether anyone nearby had time to fill out a form.
What we’re building
An index. Every human life, as completely as the historical record allows. Names. Dates. Places. Stories — when families add them. Connections — when records show them.
The profiles are permanent. Free to create, free to view, free forever. There is no premium tier that holds your grandfather’s biography hostage. There is no subscription that expires and takes the record with it.
We use AI to cross-reference records and enrich profiles with detail from public sources. We use scrapers to pull from every obituary feed we can find. And we build tools that let families add what the records can’t capture — the stories, the memories, the things that make a person a person.
Why free, forever?
Because charging for memory is wrong. Full stop.
Grief is not a market. The people who want to preserve their family’s history are not a demographic to be monetized. And the 70% who never got an obituary — the people whose families couldn’t afford a newspaper listing — they especially shouldn’t have to pay to be remembered.
Eternaflame’s permanence is backed by a public preservation fund and a commitment to open-data export. Read more on our permanence page.
From this day forward
Eternaflame launched in 2024. From that day forward, we have endeavored to capture every death recorded in public registries across the United States and the English-speaking world. Our coverage grows every day.
The past is being backfilled as fast as we can. But from now on — nobody slips through.
Know someone whose story belongs here?