Finding the date and place of death in Ireland before 1864 can be
difficult because civil records kept by the government do not exist and other
sources are incomplete. There are some particular problems with church records
where you expect to find these facts: church burial records may not survive,
burial may not have occurred in the home parish and the minister may have refused
to perform the service. In addition, modern indexes to church registers tend
to omit burials.
The loss of so many registers of the Church of Ireland explains in part the
dearth of burial records. Registers of other churches may not have survived
other hazards such as damp conditions, rats and fire. In many instances individuals
not associated with the local Church of Ireland were buried in the parish churchyard
because it may have been the only one available; however, the burial may have
occurred with no record made. The Church of Ireland minister could not say the
burial service for a nonconformist and often did not permit anyone else to do
so—up until legislation changed this in 1868.
A search for the place and date of death of burial should include these steps:
1. First check for the survival of registers for the relevant church or churches
and note if any burial records are missing.
2. If necessary, refer to probate indexes, directories, and other lists for
clues as to the date and location of a death.
3. Determine the churchyard(s) where the deceased may have been buried (detailed
Ordnance Survey maps are useful).
4. Determine whether memorial inscriptions for burial grounds in the vicinity
have been transcribed.
5. Consult available indexes and lists to memorial inscriptions.
If you do not know the date and/or the place of death or burial then reference
needs to be made to other records that can narrow the range of years to search.
Probate indexes, particularly the calendars to probate that begin in 1858, provide
some idea. Probate generally occurred within three years of death, though sometimes
it was later. There are a number of published indexes for the period before
1858; for further information on these records refer to the Ancestry library
and my articles on this subject:
"Probate in Ireland, Part 1: From 1858," by Sherry Irvine, CGRS,
FSA (Scot)
"Probate in Ireland, Part 2: Up to 1857," by Sherry Irvine, CGRS,
FSA (Scot)
Guidance as to what lists of all sorts survive for a particular county can
be found in print and online; examples of where to look are, Irish Records:
Sources for Family and Local History, (Ryan, 2nd ed. 1999), Tracing Your
Irish Ancestors, (Grenham, 2nd ed. 2000), Irish county pages at GENUKI and at Fianna (this
one has a feature called "Churches and Searches").
To check for the survival of church records, consult the books and websites
mentioned above. In addition, specifics about graveyards, with Ordnance Survey
map references, can be found in A Guide to Irish Churches and Graveyards
(B. Mitchell, 1990, 2001). For the holdings of major repositories visit the
websites of the National Library, the National Archives, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the Representative Church Body Library (Church of Ireland).
There are many transcriptions of memorials on tombstones. The most recent source
is a new CD from Eneclann - Irish Memorial Transcriptions, Volume 1, Memorials
of the Dead, Galway and Mayo, Western Seaboard. Ian Cantwell, trudged and cycled across the western extremities of Ireland
in, as he puts it, "145 different types of precipitation and high winds,"
to record all this data. He visited 128 graveyards, copied inscriptions from
over 3,000 stones (anything up to 1901), and recorded more than 8000 names.
It is a remarkable record, well presented and easily searchable by surname,
graveyard, place name, and occupation. The inscriptions cover the period of
the famine and of greatest emigration. Some useful analysis has been done; e.g.,
males are one third more likely to be recorded, and younger women more than
old women. Tables list each graveyard with the number of memorials copied and
the number of names.
The recording of memorials really began a long time ago, in 1888, when the
Journal for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead first appeared. It
continued to 1931, publishing extracts of memorials from all over Ireland, not
to any preconceived plan but always with the purpose of insuring a record survived.
Others have continued this work in other projects up to the present day.
Searching for published memorials and inscriptions is not difficult. A good
place to start is the Family History Library Catalog; for a locality type search, be sure to check under the name of the county
and the civil parish with the topic 'cemeteries.' The Periodical Source Index,
in response to a search for Ireland and cemeteries, produced over 300 entries
{on CD and online at Ancestry,) and the Ancestry Irish Parish Records CD includes gravestone inscriptions
for Counties Down and Antrim (also included in the British online databases).
At the Irish Times website, county lists include information on published gravestone inscriptions. Listings
for graveyards and burials in Ireland turn up in search results at Irish Origins. For
anyone going to London, a considerable collection of Irish monumental inscriptions
has been collected by the Society of Genealogists; they are listed in their
booklet, Sources for Irish Genealogy in the Library of the Society of Genealogists.
Ancestry Daily News
