Dundalk receives worldwide attention through St Patrick’s Cemetery website

There has been over 16,000 visits to the online searchable database of burials at St Patrick’s Cemetery in Dundalk since its official launch a year ago, with visitors from all over the world searching the database for long lost relatives.

The erection in July of a sign at the graveyard with a QR code that leads to the graveyard database, has made it even easier for visitors to the Dowdallshill cemetery to locate the graves of their loved ones.

If someone arrives to St Patrick's Cemetery and goes to the sign, they just hold their mobile phone up to the QR code and that will bring them straight into the site, which is basically a map of the graveyard. Once in the site, users can view the different sections of the graveyard.

The records for each grave contain information including, name, age, occupation, martial status, dates of death, and burial.

The project has been led from the start by Jim Kerley, a committee member of the Old Dundalk Society. “It's a year since the launch of the website and the app and its been a massive success”, Jim reveals. “Every week we're getting more compliments and people finding relations. It's been a massive success, the Council are delighted.

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“Everytime there is any discussion on it, whether its on Facebook or I've done a couple of talks on it, everytime it's mentioned, the surge goes up that week.

“On average, we're hitting anywhere between 45 and 60 hits a week, which is fantastic for a local graveyard site.

“We're covering it literally across the world, because the Council have trackers on it, so they know where the hits are coming from.

“We always expected naturally Ireland, England, America, Canada, Austrailia, they'd be the run of the mill for the Irish abroad. But we're also getting it in from Germany, Belgium, Finland, Greece, even some from China. They could be all Dundalk people, or they could be people just searching family names. But to see over 16,000 in one year, it's just been a fantastic success.”

The uniqueness of the database may be one of the reasons for the worldwide visits, Jim agrees. Explaining the background to the whole project, Jim said that he is very interested in family genealogy and was often in St Patrick's Cemetery looking at gravestones and so on, but often found that headstones were worn away.

Recognising the importance of retaining the information, he did some work and found that the burial records still existed,

“I went back to the [Old Dundalk Society ] committee and said we need to do something about this to preserve the records, its very unusual to have 130 years of records, and they said, ' that's a great idea, you go and do something about it!'

“So that's what I did. I went up to DkIT, they were brilliant. They gave me four fourth year students and they used it for their final year project.”

The trojan work to transcribe all the data so it could be added to the database was aided by volunteers from Louth Volunteer Centre. Helen Dibley and Francis Monaghan in Louth County Council were also instrumental in getting the database online.

The information in the database goes up to 2020. “There's a five year sensitivity clause, so if someone died last year, they're not in it for five years”, Jim added. “We've withheld the address for 30 years, that's more to do with identity theft.”

The database is very easy to access and navigate. The QR code brings users straight into the database, but you can also access it by visiting www.louthcoco.ie, going to the Services section, and then Archives, and then St Patrick's Cemetery Database.