| Deansgate Cemetery, south east of Dublin in Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown
administrative county was established in 1865 in response to overcrowding
of older Dublin graveyards, in much the same way as Highgate, Kensal
Green, Brompton, etc were founded in London a few years earlier. With
admirable impartiality it has a Church of Ireland section to the South and a
Catholic section to the North, each with its own burial chapel. The Indian -
born author describes walking through the cemetery with her sister and
their remarking on the large number of memorials to people connected with
India. She followed this up with research into some 74 of these people and
their families (both parentage and descendants), buried there between 1866
and 2000. Her pursuit of descendants sometimes takes her up to the
present day and on occasions she is able to include portraits of long dead
Victorians. The book is self-published, but unlike so many comb-bound
acts of genealogical piety, beautifully presented with good-quality colour
illustrations on every page - often taken from slightly whacky sources (eg
modem Indian postage stamps showing uniforms of Indian Army, or even
the label of a beer bottle), but generally relevant. The author’s style is light
but with a penchant for facetiousness. The biography of Frederick Arthur
Cavendish Wrench begins: ‘Researching this gentleman was not easy,
given the abundance of wrenches that popped up on the internet - monkey wrenches, ratchet wrenches, square drive ratchet wrenches, open-end
wrenches, torque wrenches etc. Having wrenched away from them ....’
This looks more like a chatty blog and less like a conventional non-fiction
book. The author writes at one point that her aim is to ‘bring such people
[the Irish with Indian connections] to the attention of their own
countrymen’ but I suspect she intends the book to be used mainly by
visitors to the cemetery while they wandered round. We do not know what other Indian
graves were not included, and although we have a location in the cemetery
of each grave, we have almost no photographs of graves or transcriptions of
MIs. Readers may also wish to know that the Register of
Interments at Deansgrange from 1865 to 1972 has been microfilmed and is
normally available at Dublin City
Library and Archive.
The author’s research seems to have had two main components - the
internet (which I presume also includes the main genealogical players such
as Ancestry, FindmyPast, etc) and talking/corresponding with descendants
of the people buried and one or two others. The list of acknowledgements
includes FIBIS, and Eileen Hewson, author and expert on all
things to do with the Irish in India. I do not get the impression the author
has used any other sources such as libraries, though I may be doing her an
injustice. The book lacks an index. The individual subjects are arranged
alphabetically, but of course that does not help one find places, regiments,
or other families with which they intermarried. Occasionally one finds the
word “re f’ followed by a cross reference to another biography in the book
where the same place or matter may also be discussed. There is no attempt
to draw any conclusions. For example almost all the biographical subjects
are buried in the South or Church of Ireland part of the cemetery and so
were members of the Protestant Ascendency. If we ignore the flippant style
(which to be fair is often entertaining) there are actually some useful pieces
of information here, some derived from the descendants and so not easily
discoverable elsewhere. Or of course one would go to the cemetery and
simply wander round looking at the graves and reading the biographies.
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