WHO LIES BENEATH DUNDALK’S BIGGEST CEMETERY
Dundalk’s St Patrick’s graveyard at Dowdallshill is home to some 25,000 former residents of the town and surrounding areas.
The graveyard, which opened in 1895, contains around 10,000 graves that form a unique part of the town’s history. They tell stories of family heartbreak as well as the political and social history through a changing Ireland. Grand monuments to the town’s leading citizens stand beside the unmarked graves of her forgotten people. Those who fought for freedom are remembered in the Republican plot while tombstones recall those lost at sea, those who fell on the battlefield, victims of the Great flu and TB, those who reached great ages and those who died in infancy.
Retired fireman and local historian Jim Kerley has often visited St Patrick’s Cemetery in his quest to uncover family histories. ‘I was constantly out in the graveyard looking for information from headstones for different families as well as my own,’ he says.
It was often a time consuming job walking among the graves, trying to identify the right one and he constantly wished that there was a searchable database which would make the task easier.
‘I’m a member of the Old Dundalk Society and they got so fed up listening to me complaining, that they eventually said ‘why don’t you do it?’ he recalls.
Never one to shrink from a challenge, Jim set about investigating how to bring this idea to reality.
His first port of call was to DkIT, where he met with Dr Brendan Ryder, Head of Department of Visual and Human- Centred Computing, and Dermot Logue and Enda Finn, of Department of Computing Science and Mathematics.
They immediately saw the potential for his idea and gave him the go ahead to pitch the idea to students to develop for their final year project.
Fourth year students Vitaliy Vasyltsiv, AbdulFatai Saliu and David Asare signed up to develop the website and the task of developing an Adroid App fell to Kieron Peters,
The result is DSPC Explorer, a website which allows users to search for names of deceased who are buried in the graveyard and to identify their grave, while the mobile app can pin point the grave on Google Maps.
They students presented the prototype for website and app at the DkIT Project Exhibition 2018 and Jim says that what they have created has ‘far exceeded my expectations’.
He worked closely with the students, liaising with those whose input was essential to bring it to fruition.
‘I spoke with Eugene McConnon, the foreman at the graveyard who explains how the graves are numbered, while Eamonn Gosling of Masterpiece Aerial Photography took aerial shots of the graveyard.’
Louth County Council library and archive services were consulted as were local undertakers.
They were all asked what would be useful information to have in the database and the students worked on that, developing a beta version DSPC Explorer.
Jim believes that when fully developed, the website and App, will be of enormous interest for a wide range of users, from people wanting to identify family plots to visitors tracing their family trees. It will also be of assistance to local undertakers and to people carrying out research projects.
It’s easy to use interface in-
cludes a searchable database. The results give the names of all the people interred in a grave, their ages, religion, occupation, date and place of death and date of burial. The grave will also be pinpointed on Googlemaps making it easy for people to find a plot, even if it is unmarked.
At the moment, only a small number of graves have been entered into the database, and Jim says that the logistics of how the mammoth task of entering the names of all 25,000 people buried in the graveyard has yet to be worked out. But he is confident that this will happen