Mortuary cards - start collecting today !

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Paddy Casey
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Mortuary cards - start collecting today !

Post by Paddy Casey » Sat Jun 21, 2008 12:19 pm

For a long time mortuary cards* have been in use in Ireland (and elsewhere, of course) as a means of letting people know that someone has died. For those who are not familiar with them, they are little folded cards about 2 x 2.5 inches in size with the name of the dead person, often a photo, date of death and age, sometimes the date of birth, and place of residence.

In houses in rural Ireland they are often to be found lying at the bottom of long-forgotten drawers, on mantlepieces, in missals and other books (presumably used as bookmarks), in kitchen jars of knicknacks, etc. They are a valuable source of recent genealogical information. I would go as far as to suggest that one could sew up the whole early 20th century genealogy of an Irish village in a couple of hours by setting up a little table outside the church on a Sunday morning after Mass, shaking the mortuary cards out of the missals** of the elderly members of the congregation as they leave, scanning them in, and asking a few supplementary questions. With that information one takes a few steps back to the 1901 census, uses the computed birth dates from the mortuary cards to get at the birth registry entries of the late 19th century, uses the birth registry entries to identify the parents, and bingo! you are back at the 1855 Griffith Valuation.

Clare is full of these mortuary cards but unfortunately when their collectors die the cards end up in a rubbish skip on their way to an incinerator and all that information is lost. Indeed, it is being lost in this way as I write.

But there's a solution: the Clare County Library accepts genealogical data such as mortuary card transcriptions for publication on its website (see http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclar ... graves.htm ). That way the data is saved for future generations and becomes widely available on the Internet for Clare researchers worldwide.

So here's a plea: why not visit an elderly Clare relative or acquaintance today - don't put it off ! - and ask to see their mortuary cards and ask whether you may transcribe them or, better, photograph or scan them for the Library website ? Very few object and, on the contrary, most are happy to see these memories passed on and talk about the people concerned. But do be sure to get the consent of a nearest relative to their publication, especially if you want to include the photo of the deceased with the donation to the Library.

Paddy

* Mortuary cards are sometimes known elsewhere as remembrance cards or prayer cards.
** by the way, I stumbled on a lovely phrase somewhere: ".....missals, fat as ticks, stuffed with mortuary cards and holy pictures....". Isn't that expressive ?

P.S. I just found the source of that missal/tick quotation. It is from a poem entitled "Spring Cleaning" by Catherine Phil MacCarthy who was born in Co. Limerick, in 1954 and educated at University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, and Central School of Speech and Drama, London (see http://www.catherinephilmaccarthy.com/index.htm ). And I misquoted it. Correctly quoted it reads:

On the top shelf
a wire of household bills
keeled like a spinning top,

your missal fat as a tick
with mortuary cards and prayers,
a Cadbury’s box of letters........

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