Annagh

Annagh burial ground lies to the north of the N86 national road about five kilometres south west of the centre of Tralee. There are old and new sections. The old section surrounds the medieval church ruins while the new section is adjacent and still in use for new burials.

Both sections are managed by Kerry County Council. The burial registers for 1904-1953 and 1953-2010 have been scanned and are available online at http://www.kerrylaburials.ie/ which has a search facility. 

The Find A Grave project has a page on the cemetery which is also searchable and some of the gravestones have been photographed. The page is here.

Joe Maher has photographed the graves in the cemetery and the images are on separate pages for Annagh Old Cemetery and Annagh New Cemetery.

In 2008 an archaeological survey of the graveyard was carried for Kerry County Council by Eachtra Archaeological Projects. It maps the graves and gives photographs with surnames. It can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

The burial ground in Blennerville that surrounded the Protestant church (see Church History) contained burials of the Blennerhassett family and details are to be found on Bill Jehan's Blennerhassett Family Tree Site.

The old parish church is now in ruins in Annagh burial ground. It is a national monument and an account of the remains is given in an archaeological report available here.

The Church of Ireland built a new church in Blennerville in 1818 and the parish was renamed to reflect this. Since 1670 the parish was effectively united with Ballynahaglish and Clogherbrien. In 1877 Blennerville was united to Tralee. The church was also known as St Anna's, a distortion of the placename 'Annagh'. 

The Representative Church Library has a ground plan of St Anna's Church drawn in 1869 when major changes were made to the 1818 structure. It can be seen here.

Blennerville church was demolished in 1930, but its site can be seen by the disused graveyard now known as Robert Emmet Park in the village. An (apparently baseless) legend tells that the patriot, Emmet, was secretly buried here in 1803. Details can be found on Bill Jehan's Blennerhassett Family website.

The Roman Catholic church is at Curraheen. Annagh has been part of the parish of St. John's, Tralee since at least the 18th century. The original church was believed to have been built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and was named St Anne's. In 1935 it was decided to build a new church. The present building is named St Brendan's. There are photographs of the church on the Screen Kerry Website.

Roman Catholic Registers

The National Library of Ireland holds microfilms for the following registers:

• Registers (Tralee Parish) 1772 - 1874.
• Registers (Tralee Parish) 1774 - 1876.

They have been digitised and can be viewed online at this link.

Church of Ireland Registers

The earliest parish records were destroyed in the fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922. The remaining registers are in the Representative Church Body Library, Braemor Park, Newtown Little, Churchtown, Co. Dublin, D14 N735. They are classified under the class number P.0461 and a handlist can be downloaded in PDF format here.

The surviving registers cover baptisms 1844-1849, marriages 1844-1849, burials 1845-1849.

The registers have been digitised and indexed and can be viewed on the Irish Government's irishgenealogy.ie site here.

The Nash Collection of Co Kerry newspaper cuttings contains notices of baptisms. Baptisms at St Anna's Church, Blennerville 1831-33 have been transcribed by Bridget Smith.

From 1863 Annagh was part of the Tralee Superintendent Registrar's District. See the Registration Districts page.

Civil registration used District Electoral Divisions, originally created for the election of poor law guardians, grouped into Registrar's Districts. Neither of these units were similar to the civil parish boundary and the thirteen townlands in the parish of Annagh were grouped as follows:

• Tralee No.1 Registrar's District
  • Ballyseedy DED - included Caherweesheen townland
  • Baurtregaum DED - included Curraheen, Derrymore East and Derrymore West townlands
• Tralee No.2 Registrar's District
  • Blennerville DED - Annagh (including Annagh Island), Curragraigue and Tonavane townlands.
  • Tralee Rural DED - included Ballyard, Ballydunlea, Clahane and Lohercannon townlands.

Copies of the entries are available online at the Irish Government's irishgenealogy.ie website. As of March 2021 the following are online:

• Births:1864 to 1920
• Marriages: 1845 to 1945 (only non-Catholic marriages were registered until 1864)
• Deaths: 1871 to 1970

Books

• McDonagh, Steve - The Dingle Peninsula

• Geograph
• Flickr

The transcription of the section for this parish from the National Gazetteer (1868), provided by Colin Hinson.

• Ask for a calculation of the distance from Annagh to another place.

Websites

• Archaeology of the Dingle Peninsula by Simon O'Faolain.
• 6000 years of history on the Dingle Peninsula by Michael O'Coileain.

Books

• Blennerville - Gateway to Tralee's Past by Liam Kelly

The printed version of the Primary Valuation of Ireland - Griffith's Valuation - are available to view on the Ask About Ireland website. It gives the occupier and immediate lessors of the land. The parish of Annagh was recorded on pages 1-10 of the volume for the Barony of Trughanacmy, with listings by townland. 

The listings for Annagh Parish start here.

The valuation also produced house books for urban areas and tenure books.

The Village of Blennerville was surveyed for valuation purposes in 1849 and the house books are available from the National Archives of Ireland. Each page is a separate PDF file and it is not possible to browse the documents. The links to the pages are as follows:

• Main Street is listed on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16
• Windmill Street on pages 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22
• Back Lane on pages 23 and 24
• Ballard Road on pages 25 and 26
• Church Road on page 27

Map of the Townlands of Annagh Parish from the Rootsweb site

View a map of the boundaries of this town/parish.

You can see maps centred on OSI grid reference Q7894910956 (Lat/Lon: 52.237498, -9.772716), Annagh which are provided by:

• OpenStreetMap
• Google Maps
• Bing (was Multimap)
• Copy Annagh and paste it along with the county name into the search box at Ordnance Survey Ireland.
• GeoHack (Links to on-line maps and location specific services.)

• All places within the same township/parish shown on an Openstreetmap map.
• Nearby townships/parishes shown on an Openstreetmap map.
• Nearby places shown on an Openstreetmap map.