Wednesday 6 November 2013

Beyond the Grave: 3-day conference in Limerick

A three-day conference examining the social and physical acts surround death and burial in both modern and ancient Ireland will be held 25–27 April next year as part of the Limerick City of Culture 2014 celebration.

The conference aims to explore various aspects of death and burial with subjects ranging from social, political and religious viewpoints; the physical act of burial; graveyard studies; genealogy; iconography; typography; cartography; cultural heritage; and how to conserve and develop graveyards for the future.

Organised by Limerick City Museum & Archives and Mary Immaculate College Limerick (MIC), the conference will include a full programme of lectures. It will also see the launch of the History of Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery by Matthew Potter and the release of Phase 2 of the Mount Saint Lawrence Transcriptions project.

Phase 1 of the Mount St Lawrence transcriptions saw an online searchable database produced of the cemetery's handwritten burial registers. This was done by a partnership between Limerick City Archives and the History Department of MIC. The 70,000+ entries were released in August (see blogpost) and are free to access.

Phase 2 of the project will produce an online map of all the burial plots in the 16.5-acre cemetery.

More details of the conference will be revealed in the New Year, but if you have any queries or wish to submit a paper for the conference, please email.