Lusitania passenger details among records uploaded online by Co Cork group

A team at Skibbereen Heritage Centre have been digitising burial registers for some time, creating a database of records 

As well as the burial records, the Skibbereen Heritage Centre website features video tours of some west Cork graveyards, which give a brief history of each graveyard alongside some of the stories of those buried there as well as a 'virtual tour' of the monuments Picture: Skibbereen Heritage Centre 

Details of passengers who died onboard the Lusitania which were previously unavailable are among more than 57,500 burial records put online by a heritage group in Co Cork. 

The sinking of the Cunard-owned liner by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915 off the Old Head of Kinsale,
ultimately forced America into joining the Allies in the First World War.

A team at Skibbereen Heritage Centre have been painstakingly digitising burial registers for some time, creating a database of records which initially covered several graveyards around the West Cork region.

They have now moved to the digitisation of burial records in mid Cork, especially around the Macroom area, and into parts of East Cork including Cobh, where many of the bodies recovered from the Lusitania are buried following the liner’s sinking.

Skibbereen Heritage Centre manager Terri Kearney said the new digitised records compiled by her team are bringing previously unavailable records into the public domain for the first time, and they can be accessed free of charge from anywhere in the world.

“The records are searchable either by individual name or graveyard and the original pages of the registers can also be viewed for each burial. 

This latest upload includes the records for the Lusitania victims buried in mass graves in Cobh in May 1915. The listings for that year in the Old Church Graveyard include many unidentified individuals, some poignantly recorded as ‘baby in coffin 154’ or ‘boy in coffin 68’,” Ms Kearney said.

As well as the burial records, the Skibbereen Heritage Centre website features video tours of some west Cork graveyards, which give a brief history of each graveyard alongside some of the stories of those buried there as well as a 'virtual tour' of the monuments.

Ms Kearney said there's been phenomenal response to the records becoming available, and it is likely to bring more people to this country from the US, Canada, Australia, and Britain to search for their Irish roots. Ms Kearney said:

There is a huge interest in genealogy now and so many people have been in touch from all over the world to say that they finally ‘found’ their lost relative through this database and there have been numerous headstones erected as a result. Such feedback is extremely gratifying for the small team undertaking this mammoth task.

“Further records will be uploaded over this coming winter from the East Cork and Macroom areas and the Skibbereen Heritage Centre team hope to start working on the North Cork graveyards next year,” she said.

For further information see www.skibbheritage.com which has an interactive map of all the graveyards covered and a tutorial video on how best to use the database.