By the time someone went looking for them in June 2018, the slabs could not be identified at all. They had not necessarily disappeared; they may simply have become indistinguishable from the general stonework of a friary that has seen several centuries of weathering, disturbance, and time.

The slabs were first noted by Bradley and Dunne in 1992, who described the inscriptions as almost completely worn away even then. Claregalway friary, a Franciscan foundation on the eastern bank of the Clare River, has a long history of burial within its walls and grounds, as was common practice at mendicant friaries throughout medieval and early modern Ireland. The families who buried their dead there and paid to have names and dates cut into stone could not have anticipated that within a few generations those letters would become unreadable, and within a few more, the slabs themselves effectively lost. What remains is a record of an absence, four stones that once carried someone's name, now carrying nothing that can be parsed.