Memorial cards

[smcarberry]

I am trying not to oversaturate the Forum with my findings, but I will lose sight of these notes if I do not get them online now.

Here are examples of beautiful memorial cards for some northern and western Clare families, on the website of a descendant:
http://familyhistorians.net/genealogy/b ... emorycards

It has been Paddy Casey's hope that a project could be developed to ensure a central collection of such cards before many more are lost to time. BTW Googling on these items using the term "memory card" is a fatuous venture since now we have memory cards for cameras and thus those references fill Google results. My family uses the term "memorial card" and that is a much more selective search term.

Another thought: has anyone contacted the funeral homes in Clare, to see if the cards were retained there ? I would think
that the funeral home director would be a likely person to arrange for the card, so that the family does not have that detail to attend to during such a trying time.

Sharon Carberry USA

[MOD]

Another thought: has anyone contacted the funeral homes in Clare, to see if the cards were retained there ? I would think
that the funeral home director would be a likely person to arrange for the card, so that the family does not have that detail to attend to during such a trying time.
Sharon Carberry USA

It is not the funeral home that organizes the cards. Several weeks after someone has died, the nearest relation is sent Sample Cards from different companies and you go about choosing which company and card you want and deal directly with them. (It is customary to return the sample cards you are not interested in). I presume the companies get details of the deceased from the newspaper notice or perhaps the funeral home notifies them. Also, Memorial Cards in Ireland are not sent out for several months after the person has died.

Paddy's idea of a central collection for these cards is a great idea - perhaps Clare Library could be approached to set up a section just for Memorial Cards (I am aware they have some on their Foto website). A distant relation of mine in Australia (that was found through the internet) recently sent me copies of Memorial Cards (c.1900) for relations who had emigrated to Australia in the mid 1850s and it would be an incredible shame if this information was lost over time. The cards tended to get discarded in Ireland but were usually kept by relations overseas so it would also be well worthwhile to ask elderly relatives if they have any!

[Paddy Casey]

I am trying not to oversaturate the Forum with my findings........

Heck, keep these postings coming, Sharon. By putting them on line you are doing a great service to those who will later pick them up when Googling for their family name.

By the way, just to increase the search engine hits on this thread with some more keywords I might add that memorial cards are also known in Ireland as mortuary cards and are also known elsewhere as remembrance cards or prayer cards.

A couple of years ago I asked ClareFM whether they would consider appealing for people to send mortuary cards into a central collecting point but all I got was the audio-equivalent (it was a telcon) of a blank look.

Paddy

[smcarberry]

Paddy,
You have no idea how much I have on hand that I could post, but my purpose is not to see my name all over this board. I
am posting in dibs and dabs, to give the other Forum members something to read and consider when there is not another recent posting. Sometimes if I don't post soon enough after finding an article, I tend to wonder what extra details I thought I had memorized but did not write down, or, worse yet, I wrote the extra details down in my notebook but the notebook has gone missing.

Regarding the memorial cards, why not approach the Clare Roots Society about publicizing and collecting the cards ? The
upcoming Cathedral presentation during Heritage Week might be just the time for one of the speakers to talk about the
project.

Sharon C.

[Paddy Casey]

Regarding the memorial cards, why not approach the Clare Roots Society about publicizing and collecting the cards ? The upcoming Cathedral presentation during Heritage Week might be just the time for one of the speakers to talk about the project.

I suggested this to the secretary of the Clare Roots Society some time back but they were very tied up with the Drumcliff and other major headstone transcription projects.

There's something about the mortuary card thing that makes people yawn. It doesn't light fires. I've been belaboring it for ages but there's little interest despite the fact that the mortuary cards, unlike gravestones, are being thrown into waste bins (i.e. lost to posterity) daily and many of them, unlike gravestones, bear photos of the deceased. Maybe it will click one day - I have Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" in mind - but I hope it won't be too late.

Paddy

[pwaldron]

In my family, they were called `in memoriam cards'. They were either kept in empty chocolate boxes or inserted between the pages of prayer books/missals.

Thanks to Sharon for highlighting the Crowley Cousins site - I found lots of my own relatives in it!

\pw

[smcarberry]

Paddy C.,
Try the Roots Society again and tell them that I would consider it a good deed. I just pulled a rabbit out of the hat for
one of the officers (either secretary or treasurer) by finding just the right 1886 article in a Canadian newspaper for a NYC
marriage of an Ennis man, ending a search for a long-lost son that has gone on for decades. I am fairly sure that there is
a new realization that every bit of paper counts.

Paddy W.,
Wow, I had no idea that that would help you. O.K., now I have a whole new determination to keep post these bits and pieces.

Sharon C.

[Paddy Casey]

In my family, they were...........either kept in empty chocolate boxes or inserted between the pages of prayer books/missals.
\pw

Hence the phrase ".....your missal fat as a tick with mortuary cards and prayers, a Cadbury’s box of letters............". 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 ).

The poem 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........

Paddy C.

[Clare Admin]

Hello all. We had a section under 'Donated Material' on the Genealogy main page called 'Graveyard Inscriptions and Mortuary Cards'. In response to a recent post by MOD I have now split this in two, creating a separate section for Mortuary/Memorial Cards. As always, Clare County Library welcomes donations of Mortuary Cards and any other sources of information which would prove useful to people searching for their ancestors. Regards, Clare Admin

[smcarberry]

Hats off to the Clare Forum Administration for helping with the mortuary card project. I think the separate section will be
a good place for images and texts of the cards.

Now we need a Clare resident who is willing to stand up on August 29th and announce the project to those assembled for
the Cathedral presentation (in the Cathedral, Ennis). We also need a Clare resident to be the contact person for receiving
hard-copy versions of the cards and (this could be yet a third person) scanning the cards so that images of the full card can
appear on the library section for mortuary cards. Someone needs to determine how recent the cards can be, since there
we do not want to offend the privacy concerns of living family members. Perhaps collecting all cards would be fine, and placement online would occur for cards dated 1940 or earlier. Cards of an earlier date could go online as the 70-year mark
is reached for each.

Sharon Carberry