Today we remember L. Spellerberg, a German POW who died on this date in 1915 while imprisoned in Templemore Co. Tipperary.
When we run our workshops we cover a lot of ground and 'learn by doing'. The average training session lasts two days and our training manual is twenty pages long - but most people learn the system without even using the manual. People sometimes ask us to condense the system further and this is a quick attempt to do so.
In the training workshops we cover 3 Simple Steps to Surveying an Historic Graveyard/Cemetery and the system has been used to publish everything from small rural graveyards to very large urban cemeteries.
The system feeds directly into our own site www.historicgraves.com but it works equally well for building a dataset to upload to any digital database.
The simple steps are
Every community survey we work on is different - we follow the same process but every workshop is different because of the people. We worked in Kishkeam, north Cork, last week and the community volunteers were exclusively men. They were almost all farmers so they came and went throughout the day to fix a machine or attend a calving. They had a detailed knowledge of their own family history and also that of their neighbours.
This report is about a training programme organised and funded by the Kilkenny Leader Partnership and is written by Kate Parsons who is part of a Transition Year class run by Ms. Helen O'Connor of Abbey Community College, Co. Kilkenny. The survey is part of a training project funded by Kilkenny Leader Partnership. The students are basing their survey on work by Michael O'Sullivan published in Decies 1994-1997.
Ardmore graveyard is iconic - the late round tower, the early church and cathedral and the adjacent 8th century beannachán (relic church for St Declan) form a compact group enclosed by a curving road to the west and a stream and glen to the east.
Anybody who has driven the N25 from Rosslare to Cork or Kerry will have passed this graveyard in Killeagh village and it is an Irish gem well worth a visit.
