While the world focuses on Florida, gun violence is an everyday reality for young people in Philadelphia

The moment Cletus Lyman realised he needed to do something to mark the victims of guns was when he found himself on jury duty. The judge asked the pool of 40 potential jurors if any of them had personal experience of gun violence; a forest of hands shot up around him.

“I said, ‘My gosh. This is not just confined to a small circle of people in a certain community but a large proportion of people’,” he said.

Mr Lyman, a civil lawyer who had grown up in a Pennsylvania town where the local newspaper wrote full obituaries of everyone who died, had been shocked when he moved to Philadelphia and found the lives of many people – especially the victims of gun violence – were usually consigned to just a few lines. Sometimes, their deaths were not even recorded.

And so he went about establishing what has become the Philadelphia Obituary Project, an online nonprofit venture that investigates the incidents of violent deaths and commissions and publishes obituaries of the victims. It does not seek to smooth rough edges; where a person was struggling with drugs, it says so.

At the same time, it is driven by the belief that everyone’s life is of value and that their passing represents pain and loss for their loved ones.

“There is a certain amount of victim-blaming going on, with people thinking, ‘oh, so-and-so must have got themselves in this situation if that happened’,” said Albert Strumm, a former editor with the Philadelphia Daily News, who serves as the website’s news editor, working remotely from Spain.

“But I always feel, ‘There but for the grace of God’. If I was 16, maybe I would have been in the same situation.”

Trina Singleton’s 24-year-old son, Darryl, was shot and killed in September 2016 in south-west Philadelphia. The headline in one newspaper the following day read: “Violent day in Philly: 10 people shot, three of them fatally”.

She said her son was barely mentioned, other than to say the police were investigating his death.

“These are the sorts of stories that no one bothered with until the obituary project came along,” said Ms Singleton, who has two other children and works in real estate. “I felt hurt. His whole life had been reduced to a sentence, or not even a whole sentence.”

Ms Singleton said she was delighted that the students in Florida campaigning for change following a school shooting that left 17 dead were receiving such widespread and positive publicity. Yet she said, this was the sort of coverage that shooting deaths in south-west Philadelphia never attracted. “I don’t want to sound [racist],” she said. “But I believe it’s just as important to get the guns off the streets of south-west Philadelphia, as from the streets of Parkland.”

Annie Coulter lost her daughter, Caitlin, when she was murdered last August at her apartment in the city’s Passyunk Square neighbourhood. She said the 23-year-old had been struggling with drug problems but had recently started volunteering as as a counsellor.

After her death, the obituary project got in touch and said it wanted to tell the story of the young woman’s life – the good and the bad. Ms Coulter said it was an enormous help to the family to see their daughter remembered as a person, somebody with dreams, a young woman who was caring for family and who had plans of going to college.

She loved to take her family members to the cinema or ice-skating and had four brothers, Dan, Anthony, John and Mason, and four sisters – Miranda, Victoria, Rebecca and Cassandra.

“I was so proud of her. It takes a lot to get knocked off your feet and to get back up,” she said. “The obituary was huge for us. It meant that people could read other things about her and get a sense of who she was.”

She added: “For us, we’re still struggling. It has just happened six months ago and it was extremely rough.”

The obituaries are investigated and written by Taylor Farnsworth and Jen Lawson, who each month receive a list of homicides from the city’s police department. They also scour for information – sometimes just scraps – in the city’s newspapers and websites. They have also been developing their own contacts within the community.

“I have really felt this has made a difference those people who have lost a loved one,” said Ms Farnsworth. “Some of the people we speak to lost relatives years ago, some it was just a few months earlier. The grieving process is at a different stage.”

She added: “Sometimes the media will just report that a 19-year-old was killed at some intersection and that’s it. Depending on the way the media frames something, you can forget that it was a person with connections and family.”