Burials

Doug,

You ask if people sometimes buried “relatives where they lived.” By that I assume you mean on their own land? If so, the answer is no. That would have been very unusual.  Almost unknown in Ireland.  People normally buried their ancestors in a conventional graveyard.

But that might not be the graveyard connected to the church they attended. If there was an ancestral plot elsewhere, possibly in another parish even, then they might use that. You have put this query under the parish of Kilskeery. I know of 3 graveyards in that parish (Kilskeery Church of Ireland, Magheralough RC & Kilskeery Old which was shared by all denominations).

The other thing to consider is that the majority of the population didn’t have a gravestone. The average labourer couldn’t afford one, so your ancestors may be in the graveyard you expect, but just there is no gravestone. Only the Church of Ireland routinely kept burial records in the 1800s and early 1900s and even those aren’t comprehensive, so if there’s no gravestone and no burial record it can be hard to find the graves.