I Am Not Dead, but Do Sleep Here: The Representation of Children in Early Modern Burial Grounds in the North of Ireland

Abstract

The nature of burial practices relating to children within formal ecclesiastical burial grounds in the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century has, to date, been largely ignored by archaeologists. Even a preliminary survey of such memorials, however, indicates that gravestones erected in the memory of children form a substantial component of the overall corpus of memorials within individual graveyards or cemeteries. A child from a wealthy background might be buried with an elaborately inscribed gravestone, while others were buried anonymously within their family plot, with only a brief reference to their short lives recorded on the memorial. In contrast, many un-named victims of epidemics or famine were buried in common pits, whilst unbaptised children denied burial in consecrated ground were laid to rest in the local children's burial ground or cillín, without formal burial rites by the Roman Catholic church. This study examines the commemoration of children in four case study graveyards in the north of Ireland which date to between the later seventeenth century and the end of the nineteenth century. A survey of the number of memorials and the inscriptions they carry enables a more complete picture of the lives and deaths of the children they commemorate to become apparent.