Charity Gallardo
Network Administrator
Fairhaven Family Group
This is the information age. Everything you ever wanted to know about anything is at your fingertips via the internet. We all have email, instant messenger, Twitter, blogs, websites, message boards, and more. They all have logins requiring passwords. We start saving the passwords in our browsers because we can’t remember them all. On a daily basis this works pretty well for most people. However, what if you got sick? What if something unexpected happened to you? What if you died?
Recently, a friend of mine had to deal with this very question. A close friend of his became ill with cancer for the fourth time. Lisa had a very popular blog and wondered what would happen to it when she died. Her husband and children were not bloggers. So she turned to my friend and gave him her “power of blog”. When she went into hospice and could no longer blog, he updated her friends and fans via her blog. And when she finally died, he let everyone know by posting on her blog. The blog was used to alert people to her virtual service and it went silent with Lisa’s final blog post, posted by my friend Karl.
Thinking about your presence on the internet is something most people do not do. Yet most of us belong to online communities where someone would certainly notice if we stopped coming around. When Lisa died, within a month or so, the blogging community I belong to began passing around the link to a service called Legacy Locker. I checked it out because I own a dozen domains and maintain websites, forums, and blogs not just for myself but for other people including my daughter. If something happened to me, I wouldn’t want those people to lose their communities and blogs.
Legacy Locker provides a safe and secure way to pass your online accounts to your friends and family. It’s the “power of blog” to the nth degree. It’s relatively inexpensive and easy to figure out.
After ten years in this industry, I know the value of pre-planning. As a techie, I realize that I need to make provision for all the online things I maintain for myself and others in case something should happen to me. Pre-planning your funeral and taking care of your will make good sense. In this age of information and technology, making plans for what happens to your online presence should be a part of that pre-planning. That’s why I’m in the process of setting up a Legacy Locker for all my domains and accounts.
If you belong to any online groups at all, if you have any blogs or websites, you should look into this. In addition, if you play any online games or belong to any groups where your credit card is charged automatically on a monthly basis, this type of service is for you. Otherwise, your family will end up having to pay for all those charges during a time of mourning.
Preparing ahead of time helps minimize the stress your family will go through. If you prepare for what will happen to your pet or car in the event of your death, you should also consider dealing with your email, blog, and other internet presences. The people and friends you interact with in those communities will be grateful for information about you and in turn they can help support your family through a difficult time.
When you’re ready to pre-plan, you should definitely add your internet presence to the to-do list. Whether you choose Legacy Locker or you simply make a list of your passwords and logins, preparing in advance gives you peace of mind, knowing that your online world will be taken care of and informed.
Find out more about Legacy Locker on their FAQ page.
See what CNN had to say about Legacy Locker.
