You remember that REB had cancer and we haven’t seen him in a very, very, very long time. We have no way of knowing what happened to him. When RNE passed on, we’d have never known if I hadn’t gone searching Google for him after he wasn’t returning my e-mails and hadn’t been around to any of the sites. I found his obit and called his employer to find out more.

So, we online need some way to know when our friends have passed over. I “see” a database of someone’s real name and a contact plus a list of all the sites to which they belong plus the names they use on all those sites. (all search items) All in total complete confidence, protected. Then the database keeper could check on the person’s well-being at the request of an on-line friend to make sure they’re OK. I’m not going to plan the whole thing out. Whoever wants to do something like this will have to have their own vision, ideas and see the possibilities.

It would have to be marketed. Somewhere in all this info gathering and providing info to the sites that one of their number has passed over, charges can be made (small ones but when you have a lot subscribers, it can end up a large sum). It would have to be developed and marketed.

Yes, there are places on-line where you can check obits, etc. but 1. you have to know a person’s real name and place of residence and 2. all obits don’t show up. You can check military records for those who are vets but there is a charge for that, more than I want to pay for one search.

Compiling the list will be work intensive but there may be ways where people can feed their info directly into the database themselves without it ever being seen by another individual, to reside there in secret until someone checks to see their status. Each person who signs up would have to not only have a contact but be encouraged to have someone contact the database to give the info that the person is now deceased.

I keep adding more to this as I think about it but I don’ have the knowledge to create it or the marketing skills to get the database entries/members. One would have to be very careful how they go about all this because privacy is an issue. It’s why I don’t belong to Facebook or Twitter.

I think there should be a small charge to check the database but there could also be other ways of making money off this. Shoot, I’d pay a couple of bucks to check something but I wouldn’t pay $7-15 to do it. The money would be in the numbers of people participating. There might be a small charge to deposit your info in the database.

I think it’s got real possibilities if there’s not already something out there like it.