Introduction
Heritage tourism must not shirk the hard stories. Good quality research must follow the evidence as it appears and on the other hand casual tourists need strong stories to move them from indifferent to interested.
Our approach to heritage tourism is collaborative and grassroots-based; local community groups are equal partners when it comes to survey (establishing facts) and storytelling (interpretation).
As part of SECretour we are investigating methods for good quality genealogical tourism and in November, working with a college on the south side of Cork city, we have commenced a survey of one of the oldest Catholic cemeteries in Ireland, St. Joseph’s cemetery, Tory Top Road. Founded in 1830 St. Joseph’s represents the ‘revolution’ built into Catholic Emancipation in 1829 Ireland. Friar’s Bush in Belfast city centre has medieval origins but it was extended as a Catholic cemetery in 1828 and St. Joseph’s, Cork, appears to be the first new cemetery of the Catholic Emancipation era.
Partners
We have long worked with the Cultural & Heritage Studies (course director Shane Lehane) course in Tramore Road Campus and last year we also worked with students on the Geospatial Technology course (Ella Daly course director).
Working with Tramore Road Campus we are guaranteed a class of highly engaged students with a broad age range represented. The new Geospatial course also gives us access to high-tech survey equipment in order for us to assess has technology advanced such that high precision survey is ‘doable’ by untrained community volunteers.
Shane Lehane also has close links with local historians in the St. Joseph’s area including two gents who have developed a series of walking tours around the historic cemetery. Finbarr Barry and Liam O’hUiginn kindly attended during the survey week and gave the students an example of the entertaining and informative guided tours they provide in St Joseph's.
We have collaborated with Ciara Brett, Archaeologist with Cork City Council, on training surveys over the last few years and Ciara very kindly smoothed the way for getting us access to St. Joseph’s for the training survey. Her colleagues Mick Sullivan and Paul kindly accommodated us across the week-long survey.
Results
We went into the innermost part of the cemetery where its founder Fr. Theobald Matthew is buried. Here the burial ground is divided into sections 7 and 8. Following Mick Sullivan’s request we tailored our numbering system to follow the cemetery’s historical section.
These sections do not have plot numbers so we used our own consecutive numbering approach based on the burial rows present. The absence of plot numbers in these sections is fascinating and important. The lack of precision (using notes such as 3ft south of Jeremiah McCarthy’s headstone instead of an exact section/row/plot identifier) is hard to understand especially as the cemetery was obviously intended to bury a large amount of people.
We numbered and recorded 348 mortuary monuments in Section 7 and 251 in Section 8. A camera crew numbered and took one survey photo of each gravestone. The students worked in small teams to record the biographical data on each headstone on a paper record sheet. The Geospatial Technology students then recorded high-precision locations using a Trimble handheld survey device with the intention of combining the paper record sheets with the digital dataset.
Under the Incultum project, we developed a system for digitising handwritten record sheets using AI. Since mid-2023, it has been one of our main methods for data entry. We are presently working on the St Joseph’s dataset—section 8 was digitised and transferred to a Google sheet during the survey week, and Section 7 transcription is imminent.
Conclusion
The Tramore Road Campus students recorded 599 mortuary monuments in four days onsite. We are currently assessing the quality of the survey data (by randomly selecting a representative sample of the dataset and having those checked by experienced surveyors).
The students are researching some of the life histories of the headstones they encountered. While we are also considering how to work with the local community to further develop their storytelling and research on St. Joseph’s cemetery.
Of course, some of the stories identified are interesting, tugging at the heartstrings but many represent difficult histories which we also hope to explore as the survey work continues. Fr. Matthew had the cemetery opened and working just before the 1832 Cholera epidemic struck Cork. St. Joseph's also featured heavily (Bhreatnach, A 2023) in the city's attempts to deal with the trauma of the Great Famine in the late 1840s.
In the next month or so the data will be live online providing a good quality genealogical tourism product for Cork city. Making it easier for tourists and locals alike to trace their family trees; combining the online resources such as the burial registers with their own family tales.
