It was recorded, noted, and partially transcribed, yet its precise position within the graveyard remains unidentified. The stone itself is not lost exactly, but it is unplaced, which is a quietly different thing, and that distinction gives it an odd kind of presence in the historical record.

The slab was first noted by Austin Cooper, an eighteenth-century antiquary whose sketches, notes, and diaries were published posthumously in Josephine Falconer's 1942 study of his work. Cooper recorded it as marking the grave of Jos. and Anne Deane of Ravensthorp in Northamptonshire, with a date of 6th January 1648. A second inscription, recorded later by C. Hunt and Celia Ewald on a tombstone on the south side of the church, fills in considerably more of the family picture. Written in abbreviated Latin of the kind common on seventeenth-century memorial stones, it names a Jos. Deane, son of the same Jos. and Ann Deane, born at Ravensthorp in Northamptonshire on 6th January 1648, who married Elizabeth, daughter of John Parker, Archbishop of Dublin, and died in Dublin on 18th January 1698, buried at Crumlin. A separate inscription records Elizabeth, daughter of Maurice Cuffe of County Clare, who married Jos. Deane and died 30th April 1698, as well as a Jos. Deane, son of Edward and Ann Deane, born at Pinnock in Gloucestershire on 2nd February 1623, who died 21st December 1699. The stone also bears a crest and the unusual decorative detail of a tortoise. These are clearly people of some standing, moving between England and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, with family connections reaching to the Church of Ireland hierarchy.

Crumlin graveyard is accessible and worth visiting simply for the age and density of its surviving stonework, but anyone hoping to track down this particular slab should go in with modest expectations. Ball's 1906 account and Falconer's 1942 publication both acknowledge that the stone's location had already become unclear by the time they were writing. The inscriptions, however, survive in the historical record, and reading them is its own kind of encounter with the stone, even in its absence.