Coaxing and Cajoling

There are ways to convince reluctant headstones from abandoned cemeteries to yield their secrets. While we weren’t equipped to do rubbings on our foray through the old graveyards of our ancestral townlands in Ireland, apparently my husband was still inspired to do some magic, just with his camera work alone.

Remember this headstone? The one on the far right, with the ivy gracefully ascending its side?

When I first saw that photograph, I was sure I would never be able to figure out what it was trying to tell us. What I hadn’t realized—not, at least, until we returned home and I started reviewing all the material we had accumulated on our research trip—was all that my husband had accomplished during our visits to the cemeteries.

At the Castletown graveyard, which we visited after driving through tiny Ballyagran, the Catholic parish my husband’s Flanagan ancestors once called home, we had arrived at about four o’clock in the gloom of an impending storm. While I contented myself with wandering the paths between family plots, seeking any sign of our Flanagan or Malloy surnames, my husband was busying himself with his photographic duties. Wandering into the more forbidding corners where wimps like me preferred not to tread, he ferreted out the oldest and most impossible subjects for some of his portraits.

I’m not sure how he did it—perhaps the variations in lighting from the shifting clouds overhead worked to his advantage—but he was able to coax the words out of that one recalcitrant block.

Here Lyeth the

Body of Thimo

Thy Sullivan

Who Departed

This Life Octo

Ber the 11^th ——

Aged 55 Years

May he Rest in Peace Am^en

The only challenge I had now, after the assistance from this more revealing photographic angle, was to determine the year. I could see the last two digits were ’91—but which century was it?

As if he were prescient, my husband had anticipated this difficulty and arranged to take a close up shot of that segment of the headstone. Thankfully, the contrast was enough to tell: it was a headstone from 1791. Furthermore, it provided credit for the family member who had erected the memorial.

Erect^d by his Son Iohn

I’ll assume that “Iohn” really meant John. While those two details won’t necessarily help any family-history-seeking Sullivans to make precise connections, it gives us a chance to add one sliver of information to the overarching body of crowdsourced knowledge aggregated at places like Find A Grave.

Besides, for a memorial to an Irishman born about 1736, it makes this the oldest still-legible headstone we’ve found on our own, so far, in Ireland.

Photographs showing the placement and details for the Sullivan headstone were obtained from the graveyard at the Catholic Church ruins in Castletown (sometimes called Castletown-Conyers) in County Limerick, Ireland. Photographs courtesy Chris Stevens.