County Kerry Burial Index

     Spring is here, though you’d never know it by the inch of snow on the ground here in upstate New York and in the spring a genealogist’s fancy turns to thoughts of…you guessed it… cemeteries.  I wanted to share this site I came across http://www.kerrylaburials.ie/en/Index.aspx   It’s a database of burials in County Kerry.   By using the browse function you can select a cemetery and see what dates are covered, then click on the link for the cemetery book and read through it.

     You can also use the search function, by townland, cemetery, date or name; or all four at once.  The burials don’t go back terribly far, the oldest I’ve seen is for around 1899, but if some of your relatives remained in Ireland you may get lucky and find one of them here.  Or would finding them in a cemetery be unlucky… for them anyway?

      If it’s older records you want to view, try this site http://www.irishgenealogy.ie  featuring Catholic records from Cork and Ross, Dublin and County Kerry, along with Church of Ireland records from Dublin, Kerry and Carlow.  These are actual church burial records, not cemetery listings; they also have baptisms and marriages. Nearly all the burial records however, are Church of Ireland; most Catholic parishes did not keep burial records until the 20^th century.  If your ancestors were Catholic you should still take a look at the COI records, Catholics are sometimes found there.

    If you do find an entry of interest, you can use the mapping function at the first site to get an idea of where the cemetery is located in Kerry.  There are 140 of them indexed at present, and plans to add more in the future.