COLUMBIA - Hundreds of people die on S.C. roads every year.

And chances are, many people won't know anything about the dead.

What did 18-year-old Bobby Welch Jr. study?

What type of surgeon did Jennifer Teuton, 19, want to be?

Until this month, both Welch and Teuton, two of the 1,059 people who died on state highways in 2001 would likely have remained statistics to most people.

But a Web site put together by the S.C. Highway Patrol could change that.

In early December, the department unveiled its fatality memorial Web site. It allows Web surfers to read tributes to auto crash victims and see their pictures.

Highway Patrol Cmdr. Col. Russell Roark said it puts a face to the statistics and also allows relatives of crash victims to connect with each other. The idea came as an offshoot of the department's practice of sending notes of condolence to the families of victims.

A card asking for families' tributes for the Web site is now included in the note.

"Its very therapeutic," Roark said.

So far, eight people are profiled on the Web site. Relatives of crash victims can add their tributes by logging on to the site.

When providing information, they are asked to consider introspective details, like what they miss most about the person or what people should know about them.

One of the eight people - John Morgan Long Sr. from Statham, Ga. - died in 2002 of injuries received in a crash along U.S. 17 in Murrells Inlet.

His daughter Patty posted this on the Web site: "John, my daddy, was a one-of-a-kind person. He could go anywhere in the world, and he really did do a lot of traveling in his life; and he never met a stranger."

With Lisa Radvansky's contribution, visitors learn a little more about her 17-year-old son, Chad.

He died Sept. 6 when his sport utility vehicle flipped near Marion, throwing him from the vehicle.

"To put my son's face there, so that he can be remembered, is important to me," Radvansky said. "He was special to a lot of people."

Since her son's death, Radvansky has worked with the department to speak about seat belt awareness.

Some of the contributions are highly personal.

For example, Welch's mother described what the loss of her son did to her family.

"We cry every day because we miss our baby so much," she wrote on the Web site. "I ... started having panic and anxiety attacks the day my son was killed. I have never experienced these scary attacks before my son was taken from this world."

Other contributions remind visitors how much their loved ones are missed:

Mark Craps, 37, of Pelion, enjoyed the holidays and trying to get everyone together to eat. Craps died Oct. 29 in Lexington County.

A Brooklyn, N.Y., native, Wesley Holland came to South Carolina and had no trouble making friends. The 29-year-old died Jan. 18 in Beaufort.

Tammy Darlene Prosser, 28, of Florence, left behind a son when she died March 2, 2002.

The tributes are mostly unedited, said Sherri Iacobelli, public information director for the department.

Offensive, libelous information is not published, nor are details of the wreck and investigation.

She said the department plans to help the families contact each other, either through chat rooms or e-mail.

Once the Web site gets enough tributes, the memorials will be broken down by year or by month.

Roark wants both parents and their children to look at the site.

"I think it would be very educational for younger drivers," Roark said, adding that the site should be part of the curriculum in drivers education classes.

"I think its great," Radvansky said. "It lets people know that they are not statistics. It's my son. It's my children's brother."