Grave hunting

I spent a few days in Northern Ireland researching family history and Dora’s connections. I knew that Dora’s mother (my great grandmother) was buried in Belfast city cemetery so I went there to find her. I do wish I had checked, with all the cemeteries I planned to visit, how to go about grave hunting. Some have the information on a website, some you email, some you phone and some you just turn up and hope for the best. Anyway, in this particular case I was just plain lucky that the office was open and Brian, the very nice man in the office, was able to help me. I gave him a reference number for the grave and he spent some time studying an aerial view of the cemetery on his computer and then brought out the original books in which burials were registered.

Eventually he took me to the grave himself as he thought it might not be obvious. The grave was a low rectangular wall, with an inscription on the stone at the head end. It was in a poor state, with most of the text obscured by decades worth of soil and leaves.

I was upset and when Brian left I burst into tears and kept saying sorry to this much loved woman, now sorely neglected. I determined to restore her grave to its proper state. The next day I returned, armed with a new trowel and fork, a scrubbing brush, a bottle of water and a pack of wildflower seeds. I am pleased with the result and hope it will bloom successfully next summer.

My next target was EEG’s grandfather, Dr John Boyd MP, DL (1789-1868), of Coleraine. First I went to the town cemetery but there were acres of graves and no way of finding my ancestor. I rang the local cemeteries department and learned that he wasn’t buried there anyway. ‘Try St Patricks in town,’ they suggested. The church dominates the town centre and, as I walked towards it, I could see an elderly man wrestling with the padlock on the gate. I explained my quest and asked to be let in. ‘I only open the church on Wednesdays at noon – we have a communion service at 1pm,’ he said, ushering me in. I started to search the graveyard and then he called me into the church office. There was a map of the graveyard on the wall, with all the names of the people buried there.

Boyd is quite a common name in Northern Ireland but there was only one Dr Boyd. It must be him, surely? And the grave was more or less outside the office door. It soon became obvious why I hadn’t seen any reference to his grave on Ancestry. The whole face of the headstone was erased. Defaced? Broken off? Hard to say. I would never have found it without the map.

I feel exceptionally lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to find these graves. I was also lucky when I visited Cullybackey, meeting someone in the village community hub who gave me details for the organiser of the Cullybackey Historical Society. We’ve had a long chat and promised to exchange news. I found Sam Haughton‘s grave in the local graveyard but Matilda Knowles is buried in Dublin. More of that anon as I travelled on to Dublin after my tour of the North.