If your person has not yet been cremated or buried, you can still have their fingerprint taken. If they have, that window has closed, and no one tells you this beforehand. That is the whole reason this page exists.
You do not need to have decided on anything. You do not need to know whether you want a keepsake made, or from whom, or ever. A print costs a funeral home almost nothing to take and it takes them a minute. Ask for it, keep it in a drawer, and decide in a year if you want to. The mistake is not asking.
What to ask for
Most funeral homes now take a print as a matter of course, so the first question is simply whether they already have one. If they do not, this is what to ask for:
- An inked print on card — the traditional kind, and still the best. Ask for two or three if they will do it.
- Or a digital scan, if that is what they use. Either works.
- Any finger. Whichever has the clearest ridges, or the one that means something to you. Ring fingers are a common choice.
You are allowed to ask for this. Funeral directors are asked for it often and will not find the request strange or difficult. If it helps to have a sentence ready: “Before anything else happens, could you take a fingerprint for us to keep?” That is enough.
If they have already been cremated or buried
Ask the funeral home anyway. Many keep a record for far longer than families expect, and a print taken at the time may still be on file even if nobody mentioned it to you.
If there is genuinely no print, there is often one somewhere else. Prints turn up in places people forget:
- Old documents — some employment, immigration, licensing and military paperwork carries one.
- Baby books and school records, for a child.
- Clay or ink impressions taken in a hospital or hospice, which families often put away and do not think of again.
And if there is no print at all, handwriting is the other mark that is only ever theirs. A recipe card, a signature, the last line of a letter. That one does not expire.
If the print is faint or smudged
Send it before you assume it is unusable. Photocopies lose the faintest ridges but usually keep the pattern, and a print that looks poor on paper often reads well enough once it is cleaned up. We will tell you within a day whether it will engrave, and we will tell you honestly if it will not.
We would rather talk you out of a piece than sell you one that will not work. If you are unsure whether what you have is enough, that is exactly the message to send.