INCULTUM partner Eachtra is engaged in The Historic Graves project, that is a community focused, grassroots heritage project where local community groups are trained in low-cost, high-tech field surveys of historic graveyards; also recording their own oral histories. They build a multi-media, geotagged, high-resolution online record of the historic graves in their own areas and unite to form a national resource.

photo courtesy of EACHTRA

The project outlines a system and sequence which helps to coordinate and standardise a historic graveyard survey.

Since its inception, the Historic Graves project applied an open methodology approach that led, in the current framework of the H2020 INCULTUM project, to the release of the first version of the Historic Graveyards recording toolkit. This work is part of Eachtra contribution to project’s task 6.1 Local training resources produced in the pilots.

Based on archaeological methods, this simple system for historic graveyard survey has been developed by the Historic Graves Project team in collaboration with local community groups. The core system was established in 2011, and minor but significant improvements have been made ever since. In the last eleven years, over 500 community groups have surveyed over 900 graveyards and published more than 120,000 gravestones to the internet using this simple system.

The toolkit is intended as a training resource targeting local communities and stakeholders, offering them an opportunity to learn how to easily survey an historic graveyards and fast publishing the results online, contributing to a unified community heritage dataset and engaging with Irish diaspora’s descendants worldwide.

This first version of the toolkit includes:

• a short ten pages manual describing the 3 simple steps methodology.
• a quick camera guide, focused on the Sony HX7.
• 3 recording tools:
  • the memorial register sheet;
  • the graveyard sketch plan;
  • the memorial recording form.

These simple recording tools are used by the Historic Graves team and local communities in every new survey. We release them now as a package with the intention, and the wish, that it can become a useful and inspiring kit to engage with new communities gravitating into the Historic Graveyards orbit, but also an easy-to-understand and inspiring example to train local groups on how to work with local heritage and store data in a systematic way.

Download as a zip folder (1,57 Mb)