VANCOUVER – If you visit Edouard Garneau’s grave in Seattle, you’ll see the usual bits of information etched into his bench-style headstone – his name, when he was born, and the date that he died last August at the age of 78.
And you’ll also find a small square barcode, known as a QR code, next to his name. Scan it with a smartphone, and you’ll be taken to a detailed online obituary and a photo gallery featuring Garneau, his family and even a picture of him posing with talk show host Jay Leno.
“I just think it’s a wonderful thing when someone who knows Ed goes on there – it brings someone who’s gone a little closer,” says his 76-year-old wife, Faye Garneau.
“I’m going to have one when I go, only I’m going to write it before I go,” she adds with a laugh, “so I can get everything I want on it.”
Gravestones are the latest use for QR codes, complex barcodes that can link smartphones with the web. The Seattle-based company that produced Garneau’s grave marker made headlines last year for becoming one of the first in North America to offer the technology, and now a Canadian company has become what it believes is the first in this country to follow suit.
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Remco Memorials, based in Regina with offices across Western Canada, introduced its QR code system in December, offering to print the barcodes onto rugged vinyl stickers and attaching them to grave markers. Once scanned with a compatible smartphone, a visitor is taken to either an online obituary hosted by Remco or another website, such as a memorial Facebook page.
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Company president Dave Reeson says he hasn’t sold any of the QR code headstones yet – the frozen ground of Western Canadian winters means many people wait until the spring to purchase grave markers – but he says there’s been considerable interest from people searching for a unique way to memorialize their loved ones.
“There’s only so much you can say on a cemetery monument; you can say so much more using this technology,” says Reeson.
“What has tweaked the interest of our consumers is that we’re taking a fairly traditional profession and we’re using the leading-edge technology to add something to it.”
Remco’s QR codes add $75 to the cost of a grave marker, which can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousands.
As with most forms of technology, Reeson knows the QR code, the websites they link to and the phones that scan them likely won’t be around forever – a problem he’s addressed by making the barcodes removable.
“It was part of our thought process, and I would say the application of QR code technology may only be with us for a period of years,” says Reeson.
“The temporary nature of the technology drove us to use vinyl, as opposed to permanently engraving that QR code in the granite.”
Technology has slowly been making its way into the grieving process, with online obituaries and memorial websites now commonplace.
Some cemeteries offer smartphone apps with databases of graves and maps to find them. Others allow users to plot their family member’s grave using GPS technology and then share the location with others.
For David Quiring, whose company Quiring Monuments made Edouard Garneau’s QR-enabled headstone, incorporating the web into how people remember the dead opens up a world of possibilities, whether it’s through QR codes or whatever technology replaces them.
“Who’s to say how long QR codes will be around? But there will be other ways to connect with information on the web for many years,” says Quiring.
“We’re putting stuff on that website that we couldn’t possibly carve on the monument. It’s much more robust memorialization than we’ve ever been able to do.”
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