Irish cemeteries are an element of genealogical and family history in Ireland. Though often overlooked, graveyards and cemeteries contain a lot of information that is of use in tracing a person’s ancestry. This goes beyond the bare facts of when a person died and what age they were at their time of passing, which are usually presented on a headstone. A grave and the manner in which it was created also gives an insight into the family life of the deceased in ways which documentary records often do not. Irish cemeteries, in one way or another, date back thousands of years and the country is home to some of the most impressive Neolithic tombs in all of Europe. The most significant historic cemeteries in the country today are sites like Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin, St Finbarr’s cemetery in Cork and Bodenstown graveyard in Kildare.[1]
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History of Irish cemeteries
Ireland has some of the oldest and most magnificent burial tombs in Europe. For instance, the Newgrange passage tomb and other Neolithic tombs in eastern Ireland are some of the earliest monumental buildings erected anywhere in the continent, older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in England. Even older are the Carrowmore Megalithic tombs in county Sligo in north-western Ireland, which date back to nearly 4000 BCE.[2]
More familiar, and decidedly more modest, cemeteries began to appear in the country following the arrival of Christianity in the fifth century CE. Many of these have only left archaeological remains to indicate that they were even there. For instance, it seems plausible that Friar’s Bush Graveyard in Stranmillis in the south of the city of Belfast today was a pre-Christian burial site that was repurposed as a Christian cemetery in medieval times.[3] A large proportion of older cemeteries that have some graves still visible today were attached to medieval churches or monastic houses. There are, for example, graves extant dating back to the eleventh century at Glendalough, an early medieval monastic settlement in county Wicklow.[4]
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Inevitably, over time, owing to wars, mass changes in society, the development of towns and cities, and shifting patterns in nature, graveyards and burial sites are destroyed or are swallowed up by nature once people stop using them. Therefore, most of the cemeteries that can still be visited in Ireland today date to either the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Many of the largest are in and around the biggest urban centers, notably Dublin, but also Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Galway and Belfast. Others are more rural and sometimes emerged in places where excess mortality happened at specific times, such as during the Great Famine of the mid-to-late 1840s or during various waves of cholera in the nineteenth century. Such was the brutality of life during these events that famine cemeteries like that at Skibbereen in county Cork were little more than mass graves at the time, though memorials and headstones have subsequently been erected.[5]
Irish cemeteries and genealogical research
A person might ask what exactly a gravestone or a cemetery can reveal about their family history that can’t be otherwise determined from a death cert or a funeral record. Firstly, in the Irish context, because civil registration of deaths only began in 1864, and also as the Public Records Office of Ireland was destroyed in 1922 along with a huge proportion of the country’s recorded history, a headstone, if it dates to the eighteenth century or the first half of the nineteenth century can reveal details that are not available elsewhere.
But there are other things revealed through visiting cemeteries. The idiosyncratic manner in which family members chose to layout the grave of the deceased, the headstone they chose and the words written on it provide an insight into the personality of the person involved and their family life. These are details which, quite simply, are not provided by the rather sterile facts of a death cert.[6] In the Irish context, visiting cemeteries can also give a sense of the historical time period a deceased relative lived through. If they died, for instance, in the late 1840s, a visit to a Great Famine cemetery can give a visceral since of how the deceased lived through the terrible years of the potato blight in Ireland.[7]
Alternatively, millions of cemetery records have been digitized and catalogued in recent decades, notably the records of 1.5 million burials at Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin.[8] In addition to burial details, the text of headstones and over particulars of the actual gravesite have been captured and recorded online. These are available through sites like the Glasnevin trust.[9] Several hundred-thousand Irish burial records are also available through MyHeritage. The BillionGraves resource, an ever-growing repository of images of more than 40 million headstones worldwide, some from Ireland, can also be accessed through MyHeritage.
Important Irish cemeteries
As with any large or mid-sized country, there are hundreds of cemeteries in Ireland. Here are some of the largest and most historically significant:
- St Kevin’s Church, Dublin – A very old church cemetery in use in south Dublin since the late medieval period.
- Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin – Opened in 1832 on what were then the northern outskirts of Dublin, Glasnevin cemetery is Ireland’s largest cemetery, with over 1.5 million people having been buried here over the years, including some of the country’s most famous political figures like Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera, the leaders of the pro- and anti-treaty sides in the Irish Civil War.[10]
- Grangegorman military cemetery, Dublin – Opened in 1876 on the edges of the Phoenix Park in western Dublin, Grangegorman is Ireland’s largest military graveyard.[11]
- St Finbarr’s cemetery, Cork – Opened in 1867 as a planned graveyard, laid out along a grid system, tens of thousands of people have been buried here over the last century and a half. A large tranche of the records for St Finbarr’s, those from 1867 down to the 1930s have been digitized and are available online.[12]
Theobald Wolfe Tone - Huguenot cemetery, Cork – A very small but notable cemetery on Carey’s Lane in Cork city center. It was a burial site for the emigrant community of French Protestant exiles in Ireland, known as the Huguenots, in Cork in the early eighteenth century.
- Belfast City cemetery, Belfast – Opened in 1869, this is one of Ireland’s largest cemeteries, where over 220,000 people have been laid to rest.[13]
- Bodenstown graveyard, Kildare – A famous graveyard in Ireland dating back to the fourteenth century. The leader of the 1798 Rebellion against British rule in Ireland, Wolfe Tone, was buried here. His grave became a site of annual nationalist commemorations in the second half of the nineteenth century, a tradition which continues down to the present day.[14]
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Explore more about Irish cemeteries
- Ireland, Deaths, 1864-1870 records collection on MyHeritage
- Republic of Ireland, Index of Burials, 1900-2019 records collection on MyHeritage
- United Kingdom, Select Burial and Cremation Index, 1840-2014 records collection on MyHeritage
- BillionGraves records collection on MyHeritage
- Amazing Ways to Use Death Records for Family History Research at the MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/guide/6_inireland.html
- ↑ https://heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/carrowmore-megalithic-cemetery/
- ↑ https://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/births-deaths-and-ceremonies/cemeteries/friar-s-bush
- ↑ https://glendalough.wicklowheritage.org/places/the-glendalough-graveyard-trail
- ↑ https://skibbheritage.com/famine-mass-graves-at-abbeystrowry-skibbereen/
- ↑ D. Joshua Taylor, ‘The Genealogy Factor: Graveyards & Gravestones’, JSTOR Daily, 23 April 2015.
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine
- ↑ https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/guide/6_inireland.html
- ↑ http://www.glasnevintrust.ie/
- ↑ https://www.dctrust.ie/about-us/past-and-present.html
- ↑ https://heritageireland.ie/places-to-visit/grangegorman-military-cemetery/
- ↑ https://corkarchives.ie/explore_collections/online_digital_collections/cemetery_burial_records_online/st_finbarr_s_cemetery_cork_city/
- ↑ https://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/citycemetery
- ↑ C. J. Woods, Bodenstown Revisited: The Grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Its Monuments and Its Pilgrimages (Dublin, 2018).