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.