Galway County Council digitally maps the heritage of over 25,000 memorials
Galway County Council has digitally mapped over 25,000 memorials, monuments, and gravestones using Esri’s ArcGIS system.
The interactive map, accessed through the Graveyard Memorial Search App, enables volunteers and heritage professionals to view and capture data and images in real-time on their mobile devices. It provides aerial photography of each graveyard, allowing users to zoom into pictorial maps of graveyards on their devices, and accurately identify each gravestone and record data pertaining to it. It also allows citizens to search for burial records and ancestors’ graves, and many graveyards can be explored in 3D, giving people an immersive, realistic experience of visiting family memorials.
Throughout Galway, there are 235 council-owned graveyards with ancient monuments and gravestones that provide invaluable insight into family ancestry and social history. Previously, community groups in Galway captured this culturally significant information, using pen and paper to manually note memorial inscriptions. The online map provides a streamlined, cloud-based process for collecting, validating, managing and sharing memorial data. It has made the process ten times faster and delivers more accurate and consistent data, which will help to preserve Galway’s graveyard heritage for future generations.
More than 50 local groups are now using the solution, which has also been brought into use by historians, archaeologists, genealogists, health researchers, and schools.
Data on more than 35 graveyards is available via the app, providing citizens with online access to ancestry information. With some 30 further graveyard surveys planned or in progress, Galway County Council, with support from the Heritage Council, is rapidly expanding the amount of information available via the app.
Barry Doyle, GIS manager, Galway County Council, said: “Simplicity is key to all of this. Everything is done in one efficient, seamless process where the data is stored and accessed centrally in the cloud. With this ArcGIS process we are enabling community groups to achieve their heritage objectives.”
Marie Mannion, heritage officer, Galway County Council, said: “Digitising Galway’s graveyard heritage has been a powerful way to enable people to learn about the local and national heritage that can be found in graveyards. People can now search for and find photographs of their family’s memorials online and form a stronger connection with their past. It’s an incredible resource for everyone.”
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