Burial Grounds

Burial Ground Locations

There are at least 75 locations in the county administrative area of Fingal where people have been buried over the centuries, including graveyards, cemeteries, and churchyards. Unfortunately for the genealogist, written burial records only exist for less than half of those. In the case of the remaining burial grounds, historians can rely on the headstones and memorials only.

The recording of such memorials goes back to the 19th century in Ireland, when organisations such as The Society for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland encouraged members to go to places of burial and record the inscriptions. The Society published a journal in the early 20th century in which these inscriptions were recorded. These can be very useful, as even in the last 100 years, many of those memorials have become illegible. However, the journal, and its members, tended to record only memorials it thought would be interesting, they did not set out to systematically record all memorials and headstones in a particular or a series of burial grounds.

Towards the latter decades of the 20th century, much work was done by individuals, volunteer groups, and under schemes run by FÁS/ANCO, to systematically record all headstone and memorial records in certain counties. The headstones of many burial grounds in Dublin City and County were recorded and published by Dr. Michael J. Egan in the 1990s, and these types of publications continue to be a great resource for family historians. A website containing a database of Dr Egan’s Memorials is being prepared by Fingal Local Studies & Archives with the assistance of Kaelleon and will be available soon.

There are also now a number of very useful websites to which people contribute transcripts and photographs of headstones. However, a record of the headstones in a burial ground is never the full story, as many families, particularly in earlier days, could not afford a headstone.

What this website provides is free access to the historic burial registers held by Fingal County Council up to 2013. The Council is responsible for 37 burial grounds in Fingal. The burial registers for the majority of these date back only to the 1930s, when the Dublin Board of Public Health was the Sanitary Authority with responsibility for burial grounds. There are a few registers which are slightly earlier, and a few later, where a ‘new’ burial ground was opened. Some burial grounds were transferred to Dublin County Council from Dublin Corporation much later, with records only beginning in the 1960s. Some records have not survived, having been held locally or in some cases, registers were never kept at all.