The slab commemorates Robert Dobbin and his wife Ellen Fitzgerald, and its Latin inscription, cut in Roman capitals, follows a tradition of monumental lettering that was already considered formal and somewhat old-fashioned by the time the stone was laid down.

The date on the slab is 1651, a year that falls in one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, coming just after the Cromwellian conquest began reshaping land ownership, religious practice, and the social fabric of towns like Thomastown. The Fitzgerald name carried deep roots in Hiberno-Norman Catholic Ireland, while the Dobbin surname points to an older settler community. That their commemoration was rendered in Latin, in Roman capitals, suggests a family still oriented towards the older, pre-Reformation monumental conventions, even as the world around them was being violently reorganised. Floor slabs of this kind, set into the ground so that the living would walk over them, were a way of asserting permanent presence in a sacred space, binding a family's memory to the very fabric of a church.