The Romans never really came to Ireland. They didn't really sail across the Irish Sea and bonk us on the head and kill all the chieftains and build roads and walls and towns and such.
Graveyards are made and maintained by the living, as sacred places to the memory of the beloved dead.
And the social history of a parish is wrapped up in it's graveyards.
By studying graveyards we can tell who the big landowners were; who had a middling farm and who had none. We can identify the trades families engaged in. And one of the most commonly encountered trades is that of blacksmith. For graveyards, blacksmith's made iron crosses, grave surrounds, and put together grave railings. But mainly blacksmiths made the iron gates that close-off the sacred space.
Graveyards are about slowing down.
For those of us left behind when somebody dies, they are gone, but we're still here! Doing the shopping, getting the children to school, buying a niece's birthday present to post to Scotland, ringing the insurance company; working. We do a million things.
But when we go to visit the grave we slow down.
The people who put up headstones have many names.
Stonemason, stonecutter, lettercarver, sculptor, and monumental sculptor are a few that come to mind.
Sometimes, about 1% of the time, we find the stonecutters name carved on the bottom of the headstone. It'll say something like Fecit D McCarthy.
Which is latin for D McCarthy made this!
Peter O'Connor died in Cork city, Ireland, in 1909. He was only 1.5 years old. The cause of death was natural and a woman called Margaret O'Connor paid for his burial. Presumably his mother but maybe not.
It's the most important digital resource for Irish family history and genealogy!
http://census.nationalarchives.ie/
As one of the main women behind it, Dr Caitríona Crowe, said though, it's a digital copy of the census, not _the_ census.
Here's how to use it!
Step 0 - search your address/townland name in www.townlands.ie and find your place- write down some of these; town, townland name, street & electoral division.
When we started doing the Historic Graves Project I thought we'd get about 100-200 Irish surnames.
How wrong could one archaeologist be?
Growing up in Cork city I thought I knew most Irish surnames - O'Connell, O'Callaghan, Lyons, Sutton, Hurley, Connery, O'Mahoney, Varian, O'Keeffe, were the surnames that surrounded us - my own surname didn't quite fit in though cos I think we were the only Tierney's in a school of 1000 students. Our teachers were Daly, Olden, Lynch, Hannon.
I've been lost in every county in Ireland.
I like it. Being lost.
Unless there's somebody waiting at the other end. Don't like that feeling as much.
As a city 'boy' rural Ireland was a strange country to me. Except for a small pocket of S Limerick, the rest of Ireland may as well have been Ontario or Florida until my early 20s. I liked geography at school and I knew the names of rivers and mountains but I couldn't tell you was Duhallow a town, village or what?
Cork is a corrugated county, east-west valleys and ridges are key features of the landscape.
Cork people are always at the bottom of a hill or going up a hill. It has been said that our accents are forged by that fact - the Cork accent has a sing-song rythym, I'm going up and now I'm going down.
On the old Carlow town to Baltinglass road is a small, overgrown graveyard. It bears the name Knockaunarelic - the small hill of the graveyard - and it is located in the townland of Pollerton Little. I thought Pollerton was going to be a local landlord's name but it is in fact related to the limestone solid geology beneath - sinkholes giving the name 'townland of the holey ground - Baile Pholaird Beag'.
