An ongoing feature of the project throughout has been the documentation of those buried in the cemetery, with reference too to those buried elsewhere: in Laraghbryan in the 18th century, when three early staff members of the college were buried there; in Grangewilliam in the 20th. century, when Monsignor Matt O'Donnell was buried there beside the graves of his parents; and in St. Joseph's Chapel (which served as the college chapel up to the end of the 19th. century), the last resting place of Peter Flood, the parish priest of Edgworthstown who served as President of the college from 1798 to 1803.

 

There are three main sources of information on those buried in the cemetery:

 

1. A list printed in Healy's Centenary History of Maynooth that includes burials up to 1895; this list is in English and gives dates of birth (where available) and death, the diocese from which the deceased came, and his status at time of death;

 

2. A numbered list inscribed on stone panels on the inner surfaces of the entrance arch to the cemetery (illustration left); this list includes burials up to 1907, and is executed in Latin, using abbreviations for status, with dates of birth (where available) and death; the numbering system is useful in that it co-relates with a series of iron crosses on the graves of students who died between 1820 and 1866, each of which carries an inscribed number (though no other details);

 

3. A listing of college academic staff published as an appendix to Corish's 'Maynooth College 1795-1995', though this omits incidental burials (of domestic staff, members of the Daughters of Charity, students and a member of the Vincentian order who served as a Spiritual Director).

 

The documentation project includes the following:

 

- checking of each of the burial locations, with noting of basic facts from inscriptions thereon (a more ambitious project to transcribe and translate the inscriptions must await cleaning and deciphering, perhaps by brass rubbing) of the actual insciptions);

 

- a temporary website (as you are currently viewing) which it is hoped to transfer to a more permanent 'location' when the project is completed; this website includes a history of the cemetery and lists of all those buried there; it is hoped to add some diagramatic layouts of the various cemetery sections to the finished product;

 

- a print document in pdf format that lists all of those buried in the cemetery in chronological order, based on the 1907 list, with (a) details of the summary Latin text, translations in English, and basic details of the career of the person involved; (b) a record in English of student burials from 1866 onwards; (c) details in English of academic staff, students and domestic staff who were buried in the cemetery from 1907 onwards;

 

- production of summaries of the lives of Nicholas Callan and Eoghan Ó Gramhnaigh, which were then used as text for heritage markers installed at the gravesites of these eminent men.