[size=18px]Legacy.com lets others memorialize soldiers[/size]
By Larry Muhammad, The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)

...Just as the Internet has enhanced the social and love lives of users on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, it also has helped those who grieve share the loss of loved ones.

Other sites, such as MyDeathSpace.com, have obituaries, but the largest and most comprehensive is Legacy.com, an Illinois-based firm that posts online obituaries from funeral homes and more than 200 American newspapers.

It has applied the social networking concept so popular on the Net by offering multimedia memorials -- a photo gallery set to music, florist and funeral home links, plus a guestbook, to create communities of mourning that comfort the bereaved -- in packages starting at $29.

But free to relatives of fallen soldiers, and with no advertisements, is its "In Remembrance" section -- at www.legacy.com/soldiers.asp -- which includes a biographic profile of the service member killed, photographs set to music called a "Moving Tribute," and guestbook.

Bobbi Phelps, whose husband, Christopher, a career Army sergeant, was killed June 23 last year in Baghdad when a bomb exploded near his vehicle, posted a photo gallery set to strains of "Amazing Grace."

"I love the 'Moving Tribute,' " said Phelps in telephone and e-mail interviews from her home in Colorado Springs, Colo. "It made everybody cry who saw it. I called friends and family and told them I was loading pictures, and people from my sister's office saw it and started crying. The music really does it for me. And it's amazing, because people we don't know -- friends from his unit, a little boy 12 years old from Louisville -- put their words up in the guestbook." ...