Our very earliest recording of personal and kindred names occurs, not as you might expect in vellum manuscripts, but on stone: Ogham stones. Over four hundred inscriptions in the ogham alphabet record the names of our ancestors hundreds of years before genealogies were written in manuscripts. Some of these names are still in use today. Modern technology is now being used to record these stones and perhaps shed new light on some very old inscriptions.

Nora White graduated from Maynooth University in 2001 with a BA in History and Old and Middle Irish/Medieval Irish Studies. She went on to edit a group of early Irish texts for her PhD at the same University, before being awarded an O’Donovan Scholarship in the School of Celtic Studies at DIAS in 2006. Since 2010, she has held the position of Principal Investigator on the Ogham in 3D project.