Amateur Observations on Irish Graveyards

What began as a personal search for my ancestral roots has become, after five years, a consuming passion (my husband would say an ALL consuming passion.) I began as a transcriber for http://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/headstones.htm#gsc.tab=0 when I was living in Arizona. I am a very good typist and, after years of secretarial work typing out professors' scrawls, fairly good at deciphering, if I do say so myself. It also helped that I am quite familiar with Irish surnames, having grown up in an Irish area of Montreal.

In the first two years of this "hobby", I transcribed various cemetery files, photographs taken by people in Cavan, Fermanagh, and Dublin, probably numbering over 2,000 headstones. I found the work to be fascinating, even though I don't think I ever came across any relatives' names. I think my family was too poor to afford headstones, which is also the case for my family that came from Lancashire. I actually saw that plot when I was over there many years ago--just a grassy space between two elaborate Victorian headstones erected by other families.

Anyway, when my husband and I decided to spend a retirement year in Ireland, it occurred to me that I would try my hand at photographing headstones myself. With the help of the igp-web administrator, Christina Hunt, we developed a way that I could take photographs, upload them to Dropbox into a folder, I would attach names to the files and Chris would number them. She would then create a temporary URL so that I could access it and transcribe the headstone inscriptions into a text file. Once the text file was finished, I would send it to her via email and she would merge the photograph file and the text file and create a page for it on igp-web's headstone project file. Something like this: http://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/waterford/photos/tombstones/ballygunner-ndx.htm.

I started in early January, just going to whichever cemetery I happened to be near. After awhile, I began to actively look for cemeteries and the passion has grown to where I now spend hours at least three days a week either photographing cemeteries or transcribing my photographs. I don't know exactly how many I have done but I would think it is close to about 4,000. Mainly Waterford but I also have some from other areas we have visited--Wexford, Kilkenny, Cork. People access the website, looking for their ancestors' burials. Several people have found relatives because of it, which pleases me no end.

I thought I would note the process down so that people might understand why their relative "isn't there" in a cemetery, any cemetery, and also to give a few warnings about the information on the headstone:

1) I use an iPhone for my photos. It is small, takes excellent photos and I can fix a lot of what is wrong (dark stone, faint letters) there and then.
2) When I photograph a cemetery, I start at one place and go row by row. I keep track of where I am at the end of the time by taking a photo of where I have left off. If I have traveled a long distance, though (over an hour), the cemetery will be incomplete.
3) If I can't read the stone then I don't photograph it. Since I am working without any kind of written map of the churchyards, I don't know who is buried in front of me; I rely on the stone. So, sadly, there are many, many stones that don't get photographed. It doesn't mean the people aren't buried there, it just means there is no legible stone. I have come across a few "famine" graveyards. There are no markers at all but in one churchyard in Waterford a large memorial stone was erected that simply reads:

So incredibly sad.

4) I photograph in batches of 150-300 photos, which takes me about two hours. Weather plays a huge part in photographing headstones. Can't do it in the rain because the granite turns too dark (and I get too wet.) Bright sunlight is also a problem because of shadows. The iPhone can compensate for a lot though. Considering the amount of rain we get here in Ireland, I usually go out and photograph 1-2 days per week.

5) When I get home, I download the photographs into Photos and then, using Picasa, move them to Dropbox folders of 150 photographs each. Takes less than an hour to do that but in order to get them into alpha order, ready for transcribing, I have to rename each photograph with the associated surname and name. That takes another hour. Also, as the photos are alphabetized, they are no longer in the order in which I photographed them. This means that I don't always know where the stone was physically located in the churchyard if the churchyard is a big one. As I do the big cemeteries in sections I sometimes can go back and look at a section to find a stone but as some of the cemeteries are an hour from where I live, it's not something I can easily do.

6) Once all the photos in the folder are named in Dropbox, I leave it to Christina to create the URL for that folder.

7) And once she has done that, I begin to transcribe the photos using my iPad and laptop. I type the text file on my laptop and have the URL open on my iPad. It is easier to zoom in on my iPad because my photos aren't always clear. If a stone was semi-legible in "real life" but isn't in the iPhone view, I usually transcribe it using my Notes application on the iPhone whilst I am at the cemetery--i.e., take the photo, upload it to Notes and type the inscription reading it off the stone and Save. But that is time consuming (and cold) so I take the best photo I can and if I think that I can read the whole thing, I move on. Sometimes I am wrong and when I see it on the URL I kick myself mentally thinking "Why didn't I transcribe that at the cemetery?" With some of the fonts used on the stones, it is hard to differentiate between 3s, 5s and 8s. Also 4s tend to wear away and often look like 1s. I do the best I can but sometimes I put (?) beside the date because I am just not sure I am right. 

8) Also, although I am a very good typist, I DO make mistakes. My eye might have jumped to the wrong line or I may type the person's name or other information in wrong. I use the Spelling & Grammar check when I finish transcribing the file but if I mis-type and it wasn't what Spelling & Grammar considers a typo, the only way to find it is to look at the photograph itself and then let Christina know so we can correct it. 

8) Once I have finished, I email Christina and she puts it onto the igp-web site and hopefully someone will find a relative or two.

And that's it in a nutshell.