If you've always heard your ancestors hailed from County Kerry in Ireland you're in luck: a new website to help trace your Kerry roots has loaded the burial records of over 70,000 Kerry residents to the web to make the search even easier.

The website — www.kerryLAburials.ie — now hosts records that date as far back to the 1800s, and they're indexed to allow searches by name, address, date of burial or graveyard. The new website also features highly detailed maps giving directions to each of the public graveyards in Kerry.

Speaking to the Kerryman newspaper this week the Mayor of Kerry, Tim Buckley said the new website would be invaluable to anyone researching their family history or for those looking to trace their roots.

'Just think of the many hundreds of thousands of people who left from Kerry over the past centuries to travel to foreign shores in search of work,' he said. 'Now their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren are scattered across the globe in their millions. These are people who are hugely aware of their Irish and Kerry heritage and are actively looking to trace their roots.
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'This website will greatly increase their chances of tracing where their ancestors came from, and in doing so will, we hope, lead to greater visits to Kerry as people look to visit their ancestors' birthplace and burial place.'

Anyone who believes their family members may have been omitted from the online record due to the loss of records in the past should contact the Kerry County Council.

Speaking to the Kerryman, Padraig Corkery, the Director of Communications at Kerry County Council, said that there may be gaps in some of the records.

'The burial records are listed chronologically, so even if there have been more than one burial in a grave, they will not appear on the same page of the records that have been put online. They were filled in as burials happened. If a record of a burial is not recorded, then we would ask people to come in and we will update the records. The website is constantly evolving,' he said