Irish Grave Inscriptions

In Ireland, there is a project to survey of historic graveyards and record community citizens’ own oral histories. In doing so the created website, of Historic Graves, allows visitors from Ireland and across the globe to freely explore and search the growing database of multimedia records and stories.

The tab selections are at the top right and have ‘Explore’ and ‘Search’ which will assist in looking up locations. Under ‘explore’ there is a map, images of gravestones, and oral stories recorded. With the ‘search’ tab you can look on a map for certain locations or search for specific graveyards. There is also a ‘family search’ to locate items related to a surname.

The map show most of the available listings are in Ireland, but a few are in southwest England, Scotland, Australia and Belgium. You can place the cursor over a location to get its name. Then click on a selection. It will provide some information on a certain graveyard, such a the Knockcommon Cemetery in Meath, Ireland (in north-central Ireland). Being a small cemetery there are only 15 graves. At St. Columba’s Bweeng in central Ireland there are 180 graves.

There will be a list of thumbnail images of headstones with whatever information (names-dates, etc) the headstone had written out to the right. A reminder, some headstones contain information on multiple family members buried at the site. So you might find a valuable wealth of information.

Doing the Family Search for graves, you can place a surname. Placing the surname of ‘Lennox’ produced three listings. Each were pinpointed on a map along with a description of the cemetery and the full names as you scrolled down. This included a lady’s maiden name if that had been engraved on the tombstone.

Overall an excellent method to view many of the headstones in Ireland (and few other locations). From each one there can be a treasure of family history information.


Photo: Patrick Everrard gravestone in Knockcommon Cemetery. It shows also his wife’s name and information, his parents, his brothers, his daughter, a nephew and a sister-in-law.