Two articles, from Michigan and Colorado, discuss the growing use of technology to make it easier for scattered families to participate in funeral. One family used a free teleconferencing service; the other used the funeral home’s webcast option.

Phil Montgomery used a free web service to set up a teleconference funeral for a cousin today, hoping to virtually reunite family and friends from across the country. His cousin lived in Sacremento; they both grew up in Colorado Springs. Montgomery now lives in Huntington Beach.

Rodney C. Wakeman, co-owner of Wakeman Funeral Home in Saginaw, says friends and families have responded positively to their recently added option of live or delayed webcasts. Wakeman offers either a private webcast at a non-public website, or links to the video on the main funeral home website. “So far,” he says, “everybody who has worked with this has gone by the way of a more public option.”

Other Saginaw-area directors aren’t so sure. Sam Leppert, owner and director of McIntyre Funeral Chapel in Saginaw says despite the proliferation of sites like YouTube, families don’t want funeral services “plastered all over the Internet.”

“Quite honestly, folks in Saginaw are not ready for that yet. Funerals are more traditional.”

According to this story from The Detroit News, Burns Memorial Chapel had been under threat of eviction for over two years, and may have been operating without a license, as well as violating a court order. At least one family was making funeral arrangements the day before the eviction.

I spoke by email with Jessica Koth, Public Relations Manager for the National Funeral Directors Association, and asked for her thoughts on the issue. Is this foreshadowing a trend?

This seems to be a very isolated incident – we’ve not heard of the current mortgage crisis affecting funeral homes in the way that it has affected homeowners because commercial mortgages differ from residential mortgages. The economic climate has made businesses in all sectors of the economy wary about expansion, but I don’t think we’ll see a rash of funeral home foreclosures any time soon.

A Pontiac, Michigan funeral home was evicted from their facility today. forcing the removal of 5 bodies and 22 sets of cremains by the county Medical Examiner.

House of Burns Memorial Chapel received the foreclosure eviction notice in January of this year. The court order allowed the eviction to begin at 3:00 AM, although the bank had been working with the ME’s office for “a couple of weeks” to make sure things were handled respectfully.

More from Google News. Will this be a trend? Reports suggest the funeral home had almost ten months to work something out with the bank, but I know that funeral homes often deal with families who are hard-pressed to come up with the funds for even a basic funeral service. It’s not uncommon for funeral homes to have payables running well over 180 days.

No updates this weekend; I’ll be out of town with one of my kids. See you next week.

They do in Port Huron, Michigan.

Some don’t in Florida, though.