Hits from Oz for Drumcliff on-line

Clare Champion, Friday, 20th March, 2009

Newly launched Drumcliff on-line has already been receiving hits from as far afield as Australia and America.

The project, the result of a co-operative effort between The Clare Roots Society amateur genealogy group and Clare County Library, allows people to research their Ennis ancestors buried at the old Drumcliff graveyard.

Already members of The Clare Roots Society have been inundated with congratulatory e-mails from all over the globe.

“We have received a number of e-mails from overseas with people thanking us for making this information available,” said Fíona de Buitléir of The Clare Roots Society. The service is available on-line at the Clare library website www.clarelibrary.ie .

Author and historian Ciarán Ó Murchadha has praised the efforts of all involved in bringing this project to fruition.

“The sheer length of Drumcliff’s history has made the task of the Clare Roots Group which set out to record the burials there an exceptionally difficult one. It is impossible even to guess how many persons are buried at Drumcliff. So many graves were never marked at all, countless others have no inscriptions, and the multitudes who lie in the cholera grave, the Famine grave pit beside it and the pauper plot closer to the road, will never be identified by the names they bore in life. The group, of course, could do nothing abut unknown, unmarked or unidentifiable burials; for them and the volunteer team who assisted in the task of recording, I suspect the hardest task of all was the deciphering of inscriptions that were half-effaced or hardly legible at all.

“Despite these difficulties, the labours of the group have resulted in this invaluable catalogue of the graves in Drumcliff, their location and surviving inscriptions. It will be of enormous interest to genealogical specialists, family historians, and to those members of the public whose curiosity is fired simply by walking along the avenues and among the stones of this fascinating old graveyard.”

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