09/15/2026
What if a gravestone could tell the story of a family across centuries and across the Atlantic?
Join us for a fascinating public lecture:
πͺ¨ Carved in Stone: Tracing Transatlantic Communities with the Historic Graves Project
π€ John Tierney & Patrick Leahy
π
September 17, 2026
β° 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
π ENW 112
Everyone is welcome!
Over the last 15 years, Historic Graves Ireland has worked with community groups to professionally photograph, transcribe, geolocate, and digitally publish the gravestones of roughly 1000 burial grounds across Ireland. This has resulted in a searchable database recording approximately 220 000 people inscribed on over 100 000 monuments across Ireland. Last year, John Tierney, director of Historic Graves, worked with Patrick Leahy, a historian based in Douro, Ontario, to expand this network to North America. They are currently engaged in using cutting edge technology and AI driven transcription to record and study a dozen burial sites across Peterborough County, in which many families can be directly traced to their burial sites in Ireland. These Irish burial sites often reflect late medieval Irish society, allowing this research to trace emigrant families back across the Atlantic and in some cases to origins in the late 16th century through the combined use of mortuary archaeology and historical documentation.
