20 March 2024
By Bryan McCarthy
bryan@TheCork.ie
Cork County Council’s Skibbereen Heritage Centre has uploaded a further 23,000 previously unavailable Cork County burial register records from 18 graveyards to its online database. This brings the total number of burial records now available on their website www.skibbheritage.com to over 82,700, all of which are available to access free of charge from anywhere in the world.
Pictured (l to r) William Casey, Deirdre Collins, Terri Kearney, Barry McMahon and Margaret Murphy.
This latest upload includes graveyards from West and East Cork as well as the Macroom and Carrigaline areas, with some records from North Cork available for the first time too.
The digitisation project is supported by Cork County Council and the small team at Skibbereen Heritage Centre have been diligently working on it for some years now, bringing these records into the public realm for the first time.
Speaking on the importance of making this information accessible, Mayor of the County of Cork, Cllr.Frank O’Flynn said, “We have received a phenomenal response to this project, with many people discovering their ancestor’s forgotten final resting place. It really means a lot to those researching their Cork ancestry from around the world, and many of these enquiries have brought visitors to the area to visit their ancestral burial ground.”
All of the information is on the Skibbereen Heritage Centre website www.skibbheritage.com, including a map of all the sites covered to date as well as a searchable database. With the support of Cork County Council, Skibbereen Heritage Centre hope to continue this project over the 2024/25 winter period to upload more records next spring, primarily from the North Cork area.
Skibbereen Heritage Centre staff have also produced a series of genealogy podcasts which cover how to search for burial records not included in this database. These podcasts are also available to access free of charge on the Skibbereen Heritage website.