Michael Gallagher hand at text is stunning.

_{Even if his spelling needed work.}

I'm pleasantly surprised that it mentions where he was born ('A native of Roscrea, Ireland'), which seems to be infrequent on tombstones like this of any vintage, at least since pre-Victorian/pre-American Civil War times (if we're talking an entirely different country or continent, which is the case here). My great-great-grandparents (my grandmother's mother's parents) are buried in a cemetery plot in a reasonably old cemetery here in Toronto (oddly enough a parallel, that was consecrated in 1847) not far from my home, and their marker is relatively limited in detail about them; most of what I know comes from the cemetery's former geneaologist and his delving into the churchyard records (sadly, he passed on just before Summer 2018; he helped me find the details I know now a couple of years prior to that), and from that I know they were both natives of Buckinghamshire in England, who emigrated to Canada in the 1850s (a little more than a decade before Confederation in 1867).

The other little mystery I've got is about their daughter, my great-grandmother: she was adopted (or, born out of wedlock to either of her parents; this is family legend more than anything, and I have no way to know now whether it was true, possible or otherwise), or at least her parentage is uncertain. Assuming she was wholly adopted (and not the result of extramarital conception), we have no idea or records that survived to my grandmother's family, nor subsequently to my Da or my brothers, about my great-grandmother's background. Similarly so, I have no pictures of my great-great-grandparents that survived to my lifetime (I do have several of my great-grandmother and many of my grandmother and grandfather; my Gran'pa died before I was born, for comparison's sake) that I might make any attempt to pick out facial features or details that might suggest were not present in my family line before my great-grandmother's time or her unique addition to my lineage (if so). All we know is that there are no birth records for my great-grandmother and there were none present by the time my Gran'ma was in her 20's or 30's and has asked her Dam about it; there was, I am told, adoption records (allegedly or otherwise) pertaining to my great-grandmother, but they did not survive to the era during which my grandparents were married just before the Great Depression, nor my parents in the 1950s).

I am struck very positively by the straightforward but informative detail on this headstone, GiC, and its extreme lack of pretention or artifice, aside from the excellent stonecarving of what is written, about which I think the Good Perfesser-Bear above would agree. :)

-2Paw.