What Actually Happened to Jtmorriss Obits
I first came across Jtmorriss Obits around 2014, back when the idea of a purely digital obituary platform was still fairly new. Most funeral homes were still printing newsletters and mailing paper programs. Jtmorriss was built on the assumption that grief had moved online and the memorial industry needed to catch up. That assumption turned out to be right, but the execution had serious flaws that most people didn't notice until it was too late. The platform let users create permanent memorial pages with photos, timeline entries, guestbooks, and even donation links to charities tied to the deceased. It had a clean interface that didn't look like a typical somber template — more like a personal blog with a death date slapped on it. That design choice confused a lot of people at first. They expected black borders and candle emojis. Instead they got white space and clean typography. Some families found that refreshing. Others found it inappropriate and complained constantly to customer support.
The Rise And Fall Of Jtmorriss Obits Uncovering The History And Legacy Of A Digital Obituary Service
The rise part is straightforward. They launched with a freemium model where basic obituaries were free and premium features — extended photo galleries, video tributes, ad-free viewing, and memorial event coordination — cost between $29 and $99 depending on the package. They partnered with a handful of regional funeral homes and ran Facebook ads targeting people who had recently lost someone. The targeting was aggressive and ethically questionable, which I'll get to in a moment. By 2016 they had over 200,000 active memorial pages and roughly $2 million in annual recurring revenue. That was their peak. The fall started quietly. There were three main issues that killed the service, and none of them were the kind of thing you'd expect from a business autopsy. The first problem was attribution and credibility. Digital obituaries on third-party platforms lacked the authority of a newspaper listing. Families wanted their loved one's memorial to show up in the same context as the Legacy or Gazette archives that people trusted. Jtmorriss was visible but not respected. When someone Googled a deceased relative, they'd find a newspaper obit first, then a social media tribute, and then sometimes — if they dug deep enough — a Jtmorriss page that looked a bit too polished, a bit too corporate for something so personal. That perception mattered more than the founders realized.
The second problem was data portability. I personally encountered this when a client asked me to migrate a deceased parent's memorial from Jtmorriss to a new platform they'd built. The export function was essentially nonexistent. You could download individual photos manually, but there was no bulk export, no structured data dump, no API access for consumers. Their terms of service stated that all content remained the property of Jtmorriss Inc. This is standard for most platforms, but in the obituary space it feels predatory because you're holding someone's grief hostage. I had to write a custom scraper using headless Chrome to pull the page data, and even then I only got about 60 percent of the original content. The remaining 40 percent was locked behind JavaScript-rendered elements and embedded Facebook feeds that had since gone dead. The third problem was the ad targeting. This is where the ethics completely broke down. Jtmorriss used Facebook's lookalike audience tools to target people who matched the demographic profiles of recent bereaved individuals. They weren't targeting the bereaved directly — that would have been slightly more defensible — they were targeting people who looked like they might have recently lost someone based on behavioral signals. A funeral industry insider wrote a piece in 2017 calling this "grief arbitrage," and the term stuck. It was inaccurate and exploitative by design, and it attracted regulatory scrutiny that the company was ill-equipped to handle. The company pivoted in 2018. They tried rebranding as a general "life story" platform, which meant anyone could create a memorial page for a living person. This was a desperate move that alienated their core user base without attracting a new one. Living people don't want their profiles to look like tombstones, and funeral homes didn't see the value in a platform that also advertised to the living. The pivot failed. They shut down user-facing services in early 2020 and sold their domain and remaining assets to a records management company that I'm told still hosts archived pages but doesn't accept new submissions.
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How the Service Actually Worked
If you're looking at old Jtmorriss pages and trying to understand the architecture, here's what you'd find. The core product was a CMS built on a modified WordPress backend with heavy custom plugins. Each memorial page had a standardized structure: header with name and dates, a biographical narrative section (rich text), a photo gallery (powered by a custom lightbox), a guestbook (custom comment system with moderation queue), and a sidebar with service details and donation buttons. The moderation system was the most poorly designed part. Every new guestbook entry was held in a queue for manual review. During peak hours — which coincided with typical American work hours when family members would log in to post condolences — the review backlog could stretch to 48 hours. This meant that people who wanted to leave a message for a memorial page often had to wait two full days before their tribute went live. Several class-action emails were sent to support about this, and the response was always the same template: "We are experiencing higher than usual volume. Thank you for your patience." The payment processing was handled through a third-party provider that has since been acquired twice. This created a recurring issue where subscription renewals would fail silently because the payment gateway had changed its API version without notifying Jtmorriss. I've seen at least three cases where a family's premium memorial was downgraded to free without warning, causing embedded donation links and extended galleries to disappear overnight. There was no notification system for these events. You only found out when someone sent you a link and the page looked different than expected.
What Remains and What You Can Do With It
Archived Jtmorriss pages still exist on the internet. The domain redirects to a holding page, but Google's cache and Wayback Machine snapshots preserve most of the content. If you're trying to recover a lost memorial for a family member, your best options are the Internet Archive's CDX API or a manual Wayback Machine search by URL. Both will give you access to the HTML snapshots, but you won't get the original images hosted on Jtmorriss's CDN — those links are broken because the storage backend was decommissioned. The custom scraper I mentioned earlier is the most reliable workaround for bulk recovery. If you need to restore dozens or hundreds of pages, writing a Python script with requests and BeautifulSoup will save you dozens of hours compared to manual downloading. You'll need to handle the JavaScript-rendered elements separately using Selenium, and you should be prepared for rate-limiting errors. Jtmorriss's former hosting infrastructure had some residual Cloudflare rules that still trigger on aggressive scraping patterns. A word of caution about rememorials. Some people have tried recreating old Jtmorriss pages on newer platforms like ForeverUntil or StoryOfMyLife. These platforms have better export tools and fairer terms of service, but they also collect significantly more data about the deceased and their families. Read the privacy policy before migrating. The data harvesting practices of modern memorial platforms are not obviously worse than Jtmorriss's, but they're more extensive, and most families don't realize how much information is being stored about their grief patterns, viewing habits, and donation behavior.
The Broader Lesson
Jtmorriss Obits wasn't a bad product. It was a product built by people who understood technology but didn't fully understand the emotional economy of memorialization. They optimized for engagement metrics and subscription conversion rates instead of reliability and data sovereignty. The industry still makes the same mistakes today. Every new "digital memorial" platform that launches with aggressive targeting and vague data policies is following the same playbook, just with better design and fewer legal missteps. When evaluating any obituary or memorial platform, check three things before committing: the export capability, the terms of service regarding data ownership, and the company's advertising practices. If any of those three raise flags, walk away. The digital afterlife industry is small and the players rotate frequently. Building a relationship with a service that might not exist in eighteen months is a false economy. Keep your own backups. Store your files locally. The only memorial platform you can trust is the one you control.
