Mar4

3 Comments

First a TL;DR: At the bottom of this post is a table with links to the listings of all cemeteries in each county of the Republic of Ireland.

The last few years have been relatively kind to Irish genealogy researchers – especially after the Catholic Parish Registers went online at the National Library or Ireland.

However, when you don’t have a specific location in Ireland to look for family (or even if you do) it can still be a frustrating and fruitless slog. And that’s on a good day.

At some point in every researcher’s work, they’ll find they need to cast a wider net to try and find more clues to work with. One terrific site to look for clues can be Find A Grave, regardless of the location in the world you need to look.

A technique I’ve used there when there is no memorial for the specific people I’m looking for is to simply check all of the cemeteries in the area for people of the same surname. If you are looking for cemeteries in the United States, you can use their Browse Cemeteries by US County page, first select a state and then select a county and Voila! a nice listing of all the cemeteries for you to look through.

However, if you want to do the same thing for Non-US cemeteries, there is no ability in the form to select a county (or whatever subdivision that country uses.) So, you end up with a giant list of all cemeteries in that country sorted alphabetically. In Ireland, that means you have 3,820 results to go through!

Sure, the cemetery entries do list the county they reside in, but At 20 results per page, that is 191 pages of clickety-clicking. So, I looked for a better way.

Wanting to find all of the cemeteries listed in Find A Grave in County Offaly, I Googled “findagrave cemetery offaly“. In the results you’ll see links to many individual cemeteries in Offaly, which is great. But will you find all of them? You’ll also see at the top of the results one that starts with “1 to 20 – Find A Grave” – Hmm. That looks like a listing, doesn’t it? And sure enough it is a list of ALL the cemeteries in Offaly.

But, what about all of the other counties? One could perform the same Google search for each county, but I noticed there might be an easier way.

 Find a Grave Ireland County URLIf you look at the URL in the address bar, a pattern emerges. There are 3 parts of it that look like location fields: CScntry, CSst, and CScnty.

In this example, one can guess that “country” 35 is Ireland, “state” 1222 is Offaly and “county” is not used. So, it appears they haven’t entered any county fields in the FaG database, which explains the lack of ability to select it on the search page.

So, I asks myself, what will happen if I, say, change 1222 to 1221. Well, 1221 gets you County Monaghan!

So, as a public service to all of you who have actually read to the bottom of this post, I have a gift. I have worked my way back and forth to find all of the Republic of Ireland codes on Find A Grave and created direct links to them. As one might expect – the county IDs are numbered in order relating to their alphabetic order – EXCEPT looks like someone made a mistake and entered Laois and Leitrim out of order.

I have not found a method to determine the URL for Northern Ireland counties – yet.

Below is a table with links to the cemeteries of each county in the Republic of Ireland on Find A Grave. Enjoy!

County IDCounty Name
1204Carlow
1205Cavan
1206Clare
1207Cork
1208Donegal
1209Dublin
1210Galway
1211Kerry
1212Kildare
1213Kilkenny
1215Laois
1214Leitrim
1216Limerick
1217Longford
1218Louth
1219Mayo
1220Meath
1221Monaghan
1222Offaly (Kings)
1223Roscommon
1224Sligo
1225Tipperary
1226Waterford
1227Westmeath
1228Wexford
1229Wicklow

3 Comments

  • avatar

    Comment by Tom Crane — March 6, 2017 @ 8:17 pm

    Great tip! Thanks!

  • avatar

    Comment by Debbie Valeri — September 3, 2018 @ 9:16 pm

    Thank you!

  • avatar

    Comment by John — September 4, 2018 @ 10:10 am

    You are welcome. Glad it is still useful!

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