When Bradley and Dunne noted them in 1992, only isolated letters could still be made out, the rest of each inscription dissolved by time and weather into the surface of the stone. By June 2018, even those fragments had apparently given up the ghost; on inspection, the slabs themselves could not be identified at all.

Claregalway friary is a Franciscan foundation with medieval origins, and its graveyard, like those of many friary sites across Ireland, continued to receive burials well into the post-medieval period. The seventeenth century was a turbulent era for such communities, and the people commemorated on these four slabs, whoever they were, left behind only the ghost of a name. The slabs belong to a broader group of funerary monuments associated with the site, suggesting the friary remained a place of some social significance for local families even as its religious community faced increasing pressure. What those inscriptions once said, whose names or dates or pious formulae they carried, is now entirely unknown.