From left: Galway County Council’s Marie Mannion, Athenry Heritage Centre’s Alan Burgess, Galway County Council’s Barry Doyle and Esri Ireland’s Jack Ffrench. Image: Mike Shaughnessy
Aerial views of ancient memorials are now available online to help Galway citizens learn more about their heritage.
Galway County Council has digitally mapped more than 25,000 memorials, monuments and gravestones to preserve this history for future generations.
The community project captured data on these memorials by volunteers and heritage professionals, who gathered details and images from mobile devices. This data has been uploaded to a publicly accessible map, where citizens can search for burial records and the graves of their ancestors.
The goal of the project is to create a digitised method of capturing this type of heritage information. Galway has 235 council-owned graveyards with ancient monuments and gravestones, but previous attempts to capture this information involved pen and paper methods.
The new interactive map provides aerial photography of each graveyard, allowing users to zoom closer to graveyards on their devices and accurately identify each gravestone and its record data. The map was developed by geographic information system (GIS) player Esri Ireland using its ArcGIS technology.
“Simplicity is key to all of this,” said Galway County Council GIS manager Barry Doyle. “Everything is done in one efficient, seamless process where the data is stored and accessed centrally in the cloud. With this ArcGIS process we are enabling community groups to achieve their heritage objectives.”
Data on more than 35 graveyards is currently available and surveys of more than 30 other graveyards are planned or in progress.
“Being able to access local heritage digitally for Galway citizens has been a really important project to work on and exemplifies the true power of GIS technology,” said Esri Ireland account manager Jack Ffrench. “It is rewarding for us to be able to work with local communities, and bringing this important history to life will ensure that Galway’s past can become part of its present.”
Earlier this year, Esri Ireland helped Waterford create an online election hub to enhance information accuracy and boost voter participation for elections.
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