Wednesday 27 March 2013

14-graveyard survey project in Duhallow completes

Click to see for word cloud for Tullylease
The Historic Graves team has just completed a five-month project with local communities in the Duhallow, North Cork area. It started with a six-week lecture series in the care and conservation of historic graveyards and was followed by an extensive survey of twenty graveyards.

Fourteen of the latter were fully surveyed by the local groups and the resulting inscription information and geolocated photographs of the memorial stones have been published online. The graveyards involved are:

  • Castlecor Demesne, Kilbrin
  • Castlemagner
  • Clonfert
  • Kilgobnet/Abbeyswell
  • Clonmeen North
  • Ballyhoolahan West, Kilmeen
  • Knawhill
  • Newberry (Kilshannig), Drommahane
  • Newmarket CoI
  • Nohoval Lower
  • Old Cullen, Mallaghroe North, Cullen
  • Drishane Castle, Old Millstreet
  • St Columba's, Bweeng
  • Tullylease

While the genealogical information collected is of huge value to anyone with ancestors from the region, the benefit to the local communities goes beyond the surveys.  Locals were encouraged to engage with the history of their immediate environment and to publish stories about the people and the locality. These stories can be found on Historic Graves.ie.

In addition, rubbings of the iconography from the headstones were produced, aerial photographs of the graveyards were commissioned, and 'word clouds' for each graveyard were created based on the inscribed family names. The more frequent the name, the larger the representation of the name in the word cloud. The example above is for the graveyard at Tullylease. Click on the image to see all the names.