About and sources
Farewell Service helps a family put a Christian funeral or memorial service together: choose the hymns, readings, poems and prayers, check the Catholic funeral-Mass rules for a date, and print the program, slides and readers’ sheets.
Only public-domain texts, each with its source
Every poem, prayer and service text here was first published before 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States. Each page names the printing it was taken from. The site checks those years every time it is built and refuses to publish a text that is missing one, and it refuses a list of well-known funeral poems that are still under copyright.
Where the texts come from
- Hymns: HymnKeys, our sister site (public-domain words and melodies from the Open Hymnal Project).
- Bible: the King James Version, and the Douay-Rheims Bible, Challoner revision (Project Gutenberg #1581). Modern translations such as the NABRE are linked, never copied.
- Catholic readings: Lectionary for Mass (USA, 2002): Masses for the Dead, nos. 1011–1016.
- Episcopal service, prayers and psalms: The Book of Common Prayer (1928), The Order for the Burial of the Dead.
- Catholic prayers: Blessed Be God (1925) and the Baltimore Catechism (1885).
- Poems: first or early printings on Wikisource and Project Gutenberg, linked on each poem.
Church rules
Funeral-Mass answers are computed from the liturgical calendar for the dioceses of the United States (romcal, the same calendar as Today in the Church) and the rule in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 380. Where we have no source that settles a question, the page says “ask your parish”. Your parish always sets the schedule.
What we don’t do
We don’t write poems, prayers, eulogies or explanations, and nothing here is written by AI. Lists of “hymns for a mother” and similar were sorted with AI help; each list says how it was chosen.
Who runs it
Farewell Service is operated by JY Concepts, New York, USA, which also runs VerseFlip, Today in the Church and HymnKeys. Found a mistake? Please tell us.