About Brian J. Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead

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Between c.1970-1990 Brian J. Cantwell transcribed and published 11 volumes of graveyard transcriptions primarily covering Counties Wicklow, Wexford and South Dublin. Other transcriptions were either published in journals (Galway and Kildare) or unpublished (Clare, Cork and Sligo); the latter were lodged in the family collection in the National Archives. In 2005 a CD of all published and unpublished memorial transcriptions was published by Eneclann. The contents of this CD are now available on Irish Origins.

Cantwell's original typewritten records have all been scanned and are available here as digitised images. All the names in the transcriptions have been indexed - over 60,000 people are mentioned.

These transcriptions covered all visible and legible memorials in graveyards that had a date of 1880 or before and all surviving interior church memorials.

• Examples
• The structure of the original material
• Volume Index
• Name Index
• Graveyard Index
• Description of Brian J Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead
• Errata

Examples

As well as descriptions of the memorials Cantwell sometimes inserts comments relating to the historical or social context, as in the example here:


The structure of the original material
The eleven published volumes generally follow the same structure:

• Title page
• Location map - a copy of the relevant Ordnance Survey map overlaid with the locations of the various graveyards and churches included in the volume.
• Index - a general index to the volume
• Introduction
• Index of Surnames - probably not of great value, since all names (surname and forename) are searchable via the Name Index. It may of interest in that it does indicate how many entries there are for each surname in that volume.
• Index of Occupations, Professions & Trades, etc - showing the persons' names and the graveyard. The images relating to a graveyard may be located via the Graveyard Index and the entries for a person via the Name Index.
• The entries for each graveyard/church follow. There are usually brief comments on the graveyard and/or church at the start of each section.
• The Volume Index allows you to access the images for each entire volume.

For further detailed information on his approach see Brian Cantwell's biography.


Volume Index   Free to access
Please note that the actual inscriptions are accessible only via the Name Index and the Graveyard Index. All other content within Brian Cantwell's publications is accessible via this.
Click here for Volume Index with links to relevant images.


Name Index   For Irish Origins subscribers only
The Name Index is a searchable database of all names mentioned in Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead. You can search by Surname, Forename, County and Graveyard/Church.

There are 60,791 names in the Name Index, with the following counts per county:

County	No. of Names
Clare	1,571
Cork	215
Dublin	3,151
Galway	235
Kildare	387
Sligo	61
Wexford	36,990
Wicklow	18,181

Graveyard Index   For Irish Origins subscribers only
You can select a specific graveyard/church within a county and browse through digitised images of all Cantwell's abstracts for that graveyard or church.

See also:	Help on Searching - Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead
	Description of Brian J Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead
	Errata
	Biography of Brian J Cantwell
	A personal perspective on the use of Cantwell's Memorials of the Dead for Irish research