OVER 45,500 burial records for Cork county are now available online free of charge.
Skibbereen Heritage Centre has been digitising Cork County Council burial registers for some time and this latest upload of records brings the total number of graveyards covered around the county to date to 89.
‘We’re delighted to bring these records into the public domain,’ said centre manager Terri Kearney, ‘and we are very grateful to Cork County Council for its support of this project.’
With so many people around the world increasingly interested in tracing their Irish ancestry, Skibbereen Heritage Centre’s genealogy service has been inundated with online queries and there will be a big interest in these records.
‘We are also getting a fantastic response from all over the world to our series of graveyard video tours,’ said Terri. ‘As well as enabling the diaspora to connect with their ancestors’ burial places, these video tours mean a lot to local people.’
The video tours give a brief history of each graveyard alongside some of the stories of those buried there as well as a ‘virtual tour’ of the monuments. The tours to date cover Caheragh, Drimoleague, Aughadown, Abbeystrowry and Abbeymahon in Skibbereen, cillíní (children’s burial grounds) in West Cork as well as one on the burial grounds at Schull and Skibbereen Workhouses.
The West Cork Graveyards database and videos are available to view on skibbheritage.com.
