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, and organisations such as The Society for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead encouraged members to go to places of burial and record the inscriptions on the memorials. The Society published a journal in the early 20th century which recorded these inscriptions. 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, it id 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 both by individuals, volunteers, and under schemes such as FAS, to systematically record all headstone and memorial records in certain counties. The headstones of burial grounds in Dublin City and County were recorded and published by Dr. M.S. Egan in the 90s, and these publications continue to be a great resource for family historians.

There are also now a number of very useful websites to which people contribute transcripts and photographs of headstones (see Links section). 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 aims to provide is access to every record of a burial in Fingal from the records held by Fingal County Council. The Council is responsible for 33 burial grounds in Fingal. The Burial Registers for the majority of these burial grounds 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 were just lost.

The Dublin Board of Public health map drawings of the layout of plots for most, but not all burial grounds, and where these exist, we have included them with the scans of the Burial Registers. Burials in Fingal in the last 5 years have not been placed online yet, as it was felt to be too recent, but they will be added in due time.