Gravestone inscriptions and church memorials are an important source for genealogical research in any location. Their importance is even greater in the west of Ireland, where many of the handwritten parish records have not survived the ravages of time. On this CD-ROM, Ian Cantwell provides comprehensive coverage for the surviving memorials found in the 128 graveyards in the western half of counties Galway and Mayo. The CD also includes:

• over 3,000 memorials up to 1901
• over 8,000 names
• detailed maps
• indexes of names, addresses & occupations

Cantwell also states that many of the memorials were erected by American relatives. In these cases, Cantwell was able to include details about those who paid for the memorials, usually including their addresses in America. That information often is the only location clue available when later generations are trying to find their Irish origins.

The author also presents a statistical analysis of rates and dates of death, including the Famine period (1845-48). He also provides an entertaining commentary, a guide for further research, detailed maps, and introductory descriptions of each graveyard or church in the collection.

I found the new CD-ROM to be quite easy to install, although perhaps not quite as easy as some other CDs I have written about. It did not have an "autostart" feature to automatically launch when the CD-ROM disk is inserted into the computer. However, the printed instructions included with the CD-ROM disk were concise and easy to follow. The entire installation was done in less than two minutes.

I have written in the past about other CD-ROM disks produced by Eneclann. (See here and here.) However, this new release is presented in a new format that is somewhat different from previous Eneclann products. The CD's operation seems to be a bit faster than the earlier titles. The company states that this is the first CD in a new series by Eneclann of Irish Memorial Inscriptions. They plan to publish all the surviving church and gravestone inscriptions throughout Ireland on CD-ROM.

I liked the new format as it is intuitive and easy to navigate at all times. You can see it for yourself and learn how to use the CD even before you purchase it if you look at: www.eneclann.ie/pub-6-tour.asp.

You can search the data on this CD-ROM by any of several methods, including by surname, by place name, by the name of the church and/or graveyard, and even by the occupation of the deceased. You can also conduct a free text search, looking for any words in a record.

I started by looking for any records for people named Brady. The CD-ROM found three such records, two in Castlebar Old and one in the Oughterard Church of Ireland. Here is the information from the first one that I will use to illustrate a typical record found:

Church/Graveyard: Castlebar Old
Surname: Brady

Description of the Church/Graveyard:

Situated just outside the town on the Westport road. It is the largest graveyard in this area of West Mayo. Of interest are the many memorials to the military; the Famine victims Rev Richard Gibbons and James McManus; and the cholera outbreak of October 1832. All the memorials have been transcribed and photographed by a local Government sponsored youth group in the 1980s and their results are in the Castlebar County Library. The transcriptions below were made independently.

County: Mayo

Memorial Inscription:

Erected by
John T. Brady
to the memory of his beloved wife
Maryanne who died on the 16th of May
1882 aged 28 years

Description: Graveyard

I experimented with other searches, including by location and by occupation. One occupation listed was "Air Force," a term I haven’t encountered often with genealogy searches. However, one of the entries in this CD-ROM cited a memorial in the graveyard of the Castlebar Church of Ireland:

In loving memory of
Major Harry Francis Chads M.C.
the Border Regiment
who was accidentally killed at Castlebar
on 28th August 1920
whilst flying on duty
Erected by the officers, non commissioned officers
and men of the 2nd Battalion

Searches on this CD-ROM were always fast; most data was displayed within a second or two on my aging Pentium III system. I also experimented with the maps and found them to be very useful. You can start on a map of western Ireland and then click on a location of interest. Each time you click on a map, you obtain a "zoomed in" image. Click again and it zooms in further, always centered on the point upon which you clicked. When you finally reach a level of detail where individual cemeteries and churches are displayed, clicking on a cemetery then produces a listing of the memorials located there.

Eneclann has a winner with this new CD-ROM disk. Ian Cantwell obviously has spent hundreds of hours in compiling and editing this valuable genealogy reference. Eneclann has published Cantwell’s data in a form that is quick and very easy to use. If you are searching for ancestors in western Ireland, this disk may be a valuable resource.

"Memorials of the Dead: Counties Galway & Mayo" on CD-ROM, by Ian Cantwell, requires Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT 4.0, ME, XP, or higher. It also requires a 166 MHz Pentium processor or faster and at least 32 megabytes of RAM memory. (I suspect that Windows XP and 2000 will require more memory than that.)

"Memorials of the Dead: Counties Galway & Mayo" sells for $29.95 (U.S. funds) or €29.90 plus shipping charges. For more information about the new Memorials of the Dead: Counties Galway & Mayo CD-ROM or to safely order it online using Eneclann’s secure shopping cart system, go to www.eneclann.ie/publications-6.asp

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