Heritage At Risk - PARISH: Church Memorial Inscriptions and Local History in Tipperary and Beyond

This Heritage Week talk will discuss how people interested in family history, local history, and other matters in Tipperary and elsewhere in Ireland might use the PARISH project’s data.

Preserving and Recording Ireland’s Sacred Heritage (PARISH) is a collaborative history and heritage project led by Dr Sarah Roddy (Maynooth University) in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). PARISH is creating a digitised, fully searchable record of memorial inscriptions in Irish Catholic church interiors. Its objective is to ‘preserve by record’ the social heritage of these inscriptions throughout the island of Ireland.

The PARISH project is producing an online database containing these records that will be freely accessible to everyone online. We hope that this will shed valuable light on the communities that built and supported Ireland’s Catholic churches over many decades.
At a time when falling congregations and diminishing numbers of priests means that such material is becoming increasingly inaccessible, it is essential that we act now to ensure that this wealth of information is not lost.

Joe Curran is a postdoctoral researcher working on the PARISH Project at Maynooth University. He particularly is interested in the history of charities, towns, and churches, and what these can tell us about community development.