The Historic Graves project would like to mark the first year of our blog by highlighting the five most accessed posts from 2011. Thanks for reading and we hope you will continue to enjoy the posts during 2012.
Work is presently ongoing in Tuam on a new road which links Shop Street and Bishops Street and runs along the banks of the River Nanny. Prior to construction of the road we got the chance to excavate the subsurface remains of what is known as Garvey’s Mill.
While in Charlie Byrnes Bookshop in Galway last Saturday I picked up a copy of Clonbern Graveyard Its Monuments and People, a book recently published by the
The Survey and Publication Process
The Historic Graves project has had the pleasure of working with Gerry Mullins on a number of our Graveyard recording workshops.
Today, the 10th of July 2011, is a National Day of Commemoration for servicemen and women who have died in wars or in service with the United Nations. Nearly every family in Ireland will have a story that relates to family members who died in service. My own great-grandfather is commemorated in Thiepval having died in WWI and I will tell his story here some other day.
For today I will relate a personal memory from 1980. We grew up in married quarters in Collin's Barracks on the NE side of Cork city. Married quarters consisted of four large accomodation blocks which held about thirty families from throughout Ireland but I seem to remember a decidedly Tipperary bias to the families origins, there were Burkes, Lonergans and Hogans. The families came together on a weekly basis for mass in what I think is called the Garrison Chapel while the broader community (servicemen and families) came together for Passing Out ceremonies, Christmas parties and less regularly, army funerals.
John Tierney of Historic Graves on a recent trip to Edinburgh in Scotalnd to talk at the Digital Futures Conference took the accompanying photograph in the graveyard known as the
Professor Laurie Taylor on BBC 4's Thinking Allowed is worth a weekly listen and today his discussion with Dr. Kate Woodthorpe delves deeply into modern, East London, attitudes to death, burial, bodies and cemeteries.
Reference
As a hyperlocal heritage project we find it easy to spot top quality hyperlocal journalism - our friends in Kilcullen gave us a write-up in their blog, as well as in the Kildare Nationalist. Des Travers led the way in historic graveyard recording in Kilcullen and it has been a pleasure to work with Des on their project. We have some high precision GPS tracks from Des' work and we will combine them with the historic memorial photographs previously recorded.
