The Hereafter Now: A Digital Vault for Storing Memories

“When I first came up with the idea seven or eight years ago,” said Leif Erickson, “I started with my grandfather’s pictures of Horseshoe Bay Farms.” Among them was a black and white 16-mm home movie documenting the 1931 burial of Chief Kahquados (last hereditary chief of the Potawatomi nation) near the memorial totem-type pole in Peninsula Park, footage that included the ceremony, the audience, and the automobiles. In newspaper archives, Erickson found the text of all the formal words spoken during the event.

Now he can show the film on his iPhone.

“I thought of the gravestone as a place to put these things,” he said, “not literally, but a place where digital artifacts could be stored while visiting a cemetery.” Using a smartphone or notebook computer with an Internet connection, a person walking through a graveyard could bring up images and documents relating to the departed relative or friend and create a virtual as well as actual visit.

During the early ‘80s, Erickson was a part of the cast of a Gibraltar school-community production of Spoon River Anthology, a play in which past residents of a fictional community are allowed to rise from their graves and speak candidly about their lives. Erickson believes that his The-Hereafter business, by providing a secure and instantly retrievable digital storage space for memorabilia, in one respect, functions like that drama.

Not only are past records maintained, but so are contemporary videos of descendents recalling stories about their ancestors. The result is an interactive, multigenerational family history that becomes a permanent archive.

“The Hereafter,” Erickson explains in his business plan, is a “unique iPhone and web application that makes it easy to create and visit gravesite memorials for family and friends who have passed away. These memorials are the perfect place to store those treasured stories, photos, and videos.”

A challenge that faces all archivists, both amateur and professional, is the ephemeral nature of media. Photographs fade and technology changes. Remember Polaroids? Beta videotapes? Eight-track audiotapes?

Erickson began his business as a service to those who wanted to convert items stored using obsolete media to DVDs that could be viewed on television or computer monitors. But he wanted to provide more options and more security.

In addition to remembering his grandfather’s black and white movies, he thought about a grave in the Blossomburg Cemetery of a local resident whose tombstone has become a repository for small artifacts left in his memory by people who knew and loved him.

“I wanted to create a place,” Erickson said, “where people could leave things digitally not only for the person who died, but for future generations to see how much that person meant to them,” a momento mori rite.

The-Hereafter component of his business began in October of 2009. Erickson had become interested in Mac computers when he returned to Door County in the mid-‘80s and had friends who were Mac users.

“It’s a game you can play every morning when you wake up,” he laughed, “trying to keep up!”

“Keeping up” became even more of a challenge when years later he decided to launch The-Hereafter. Erickson learned that he could download at no charge from Stanford University lectures on creating iPhone applications. He “went through them, step by step” and learned how to create the necessary software. But as he better understood the process and became more confident in the practicality of the concept, he realized he “was in no position to write the code” and engaged a company to create it following his requirements.

By October of 2010, his application met the specifications of the Apple app store, and his website was up and running. “Now I am a full-fledged Apple Developer,” he said. With the help of a legal firm, he has copyrighted his application, has an “angel” investor, and has expanded his business to the point that he “needs venture capital to develop this beyond something local, to present it to the rest of the world.” In addition, he is planning to hire “a president with business and Internet savvy,” using a social networking site for businessmen as a recruiting service.

The “digital vault” that Erickson employs to store the memories of his clients is Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing. When the famous retailer completed the technology for their online store, he explained, “They hired computer geeks to develop cloud computing to rent out the extra space they had developed.”

The rental rate is based on space used, and becomes even more economical, he said, as computer memory and bandwidth becomes cheaper over the course of time.

“It’s a medium that can be duplicated,” Erickson said, “and Amazon automatically backs it up nine times.” The system is created to automatically expand and accommodate an increasing number of users.

While nothing, even a marble headstone, will last through infinity, he admits, cloud computing is a secure and long-term storage option.

At this point The-Hereafter offers clients a promotional charge consisting of a $10 membership fee, and another $10 for 2GB of perpetual upload space. Additional memory is available in $10 increments.

While The-Hereafter is a business, Erickson sees himself as a history keeper as well as a businessman. “My goal is to help people preserve their family stories,” he said, recalling what he had done with his grandfather’s 16-mm film. He told about a client whose father served in the Pacific during WWII. Erickson created a montage documenting that service; subsequently the client became an investor in his business.

“Today we can give the future a better picture of what we’re like,” he said, “because of technology.”

Eventually people will be able to use a GPS phone function to take a picture of a tombstone in a cemetery, he said, locate any archived material regarding that departed individual, and retrieve it while standing in the graveyard.

For more information on this digital option of storing family memories, visit http://www.the-hereafter.com. Contact Leif Erickson on Facebook, at 920.559.1062, or via email at [email protected].