Conclusion: Final Destinations
Summary
I John Burke of Plaistow in the County of Essex gentleman being in good health of sound memory and understanding Blessed be God do make this my last will and testament hereby revoking all Will and Wills by me heretofore made I will and desire that my just debts be paid and if I dye in London or within twenty Miles thereof that I be interred in St. Giles Church Yard … But if I shod dye in the County of Gallway in Ireland my Native Country I desire to be enterred in Tynagh Church in ye parish of that Name in the half Barony of Leytrim wthin Six or Seven Miles of Loghrea in the said County of Gallway in the Burying place of my ancestors. … But if I shod dye in Dublin then and in such Case I be buryed in St. Michans Church Yard.
JOHN BURKE made his will in 1761, at the end of a long and successful career as an attorney in London. He began with instructions that provided details about the three places he wished to be laid to rest: Tynagh, the burying place of his ancestors in Galway; St Michan's, the Dublin parish where he served as an attorney's clerk as a young man; and St Giles's, London, where his wife, father-in-law, son and a kinsman were buried. This geography of potential burial sites is revealing about who John Burke thought he was. These three points in Burke's personal history each appear to have been equally important to him. He was willing to insert himself (literally) into each of these places and wanted the moment recorded for posterity. For both St Giles's and St Michan's, he directed that a proper tombstone with inscriptions marking the names and dates of death of all family members buried there be erected. The Galway site required additional work, as the tomb of his ancestors along with the whole end of the church in which it lay had been ‘defaced’. Burke therefore instructed his executors to ‘repair our family Tomb as soon as it be convenient to them’. He died in Dublin in 1764 and presumably was buried in St Michan's, so the tomb in Tynagh was not rebuilt.
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- Irish LondonMiddle-Class Migration in the Global Eighteenth Century, pp. 215 - 220Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013