`You can't interview tombstones," says Irish-American Kevin C. Kearns. "There has always been a sense of urgency about the work that I've done." Kearns - who was professor of geography at the University of Northern Colorado until 1997 - has spent the past 26 summers in Dublin, coaxing ordinary folk to tell the stories of their working lives to him.

For his new book, Dublin Voices, an Oral Folk History, he has collected stories from, among others, chimney sweeps, undertakers, coopers, hatters, dockers, pawnbrokers, shoemenders, college porters, concierges, and gravediggers. Some of the jobs he documents, such as those of lamplighters and tramdrivers, no longer exist. Taken as a whole, the stories compose a bright piece of the everchanging mosaic in Dublin's social history.

"So many stories never get passed on now by people to their children or grandchildren. And when they're gone, the stories go with them." Dublin Voices is a collection of 58 such stories.

How did he find these people? "I had to start by walking the streets, going into pubs and shops and old people's homes until I became accepted within communities, and familiar to the people who lived there. Once I had established a social network, then the bush telegraph started working. That's how I found a lot of the people I talked to for my books. Today I can walk down any street in the Liberties, Ringsend, or Stoneybatter, and see people I know.

"I don't interview people," Kearns stresses, "it's nothing that formal. It would take me a long time to find these people initially, and more time again until they felt comfortable talking with me." Kearns spent a period of between two to six hours with each of the people he spoke to for this book, sometimes returning after a couple of years to see what further memories had emerged in the meantime.

Kearns has written several other books which he researched in Dublin, among them Dublin Street Life and Lore and Dublin Tenement Life. Some of the stories in Dublin Voices were gathered more than a decade ago. "Aural folk history is a happy wedding of aural history and folklore. It's grassroots history, I guess. What sets my work apart is that it's urban aural folklore."

Here follow edited extracts from Dublin Voices:

May Hanaphy (90), worked in Jacob's Biscuits Factory I started when I was 14. We were called "Jacob's mice". I started at 11/6 and gave it all to Mammy. They wanted tall girls for putting the tins up high, to pile tins, and if you were short then you would be accepted for wrapping or messages. Everyone stood at their work. I was very small and had to stand on a little box, wrapping little packages of biscuits.

You had to crease your folds perfectly. You put your wrapper down first and then you put your little folder inside the wrapper, beautifully done, very clean, and your biscuits then. No broken biscuits, or with specks in them. And no high baked or low baked - too pale or too burned. They were put aside, into little bags and you bought them at the end of the week for two pence a bag of broken biscuits.

They made the tins in the tin room and the tin came in huge big sheets. And the noise was absolutely cruel as they crashed down on the tins to cut by machine. And the women all had cut hands. You had to shout to be heard. They all put pictures of Ireland on the tins - shamrocks and O'Connell Bridge in Dublin.

We used to make lovely cream crackers then, and lovely cakes. There was the "Fairy Cakes" department. I've never seen anything like them. Chateau, Plum, Oxford Lunch, Maderia, Chocolate Walnut. Gorgeous! The Chateau cakes were iced all around like crystal glass, and it was absolutely out of this world. There were biscuits, fluffy, they'd fly away in your hand. And at Christmas you put your name in for a cake a week or two ahead, a 4lb Maderia. Oh, that was beautiful. It was just that thick in milk and eggs, you could just lap it up. The 1939 war broke that up and the cake room had to be abolished.

Oh, I really loved working there. I was never late. But when I retired in 1970 and came out of Jacob's, I didn't get anything coming out. I had to go on the dole."

Jack Mitchell (70), Glasnevin head gravedigger

I came here in 1955 when I would have been 27. When I started here I think it was £3 or £4 a week I got. Men had their own tools. We never shared. Oh, God, that was taboo. When you were made a gravedigger you were given a hack, spade and shovel and they're yours until they wear out, and then you're given another one. Now, your shovel becomes very sweet to you. Because you get used to it and it gets used to you.

We'd start at eight in the morning until five. The only day we're actually off of work is on Sundays and Christmas Day. Now this is the only cemetery that I know of with a pub on each end of it and the older lads, even in my time when I started, they'd go down there and through the railings they'd get a pint of porter.

Now in my day you filled in a grave there with the people standing over you. I think it was like slavery, as I look back on it, because of the amount of work that was involved and you were doing it under pressure, because the people would not leave till that was filled in.

Today we just place an artifical cover and the people go away and then the men start filling that grave. You do everything as dignified as humanly possible, because you're dealing with the public at their lowest ebb.

I've buried many a famous person. I helped to put Dev into it. I'll always feel part of that history. My official retirement is coming up. Oh, but I'll drop in. Now I call this the bad side of progress because, see, you used to come up here and collect your pension. Then all of a sudden they decided to send them out cheques. And I never seen them again. Till their wooden overcoat . . . that's what I call it.

Martin Mitten (81), docker

I was born on Townsend Street. Me father was at the docks for 50 years. And his father before him. And his father before him! You were reared up to it. Sure, where I was born you could throw a brick in the water.

When I was 18 and starting, it was very hard, cause you weren't known at the docks. Hundreds would be there for a read in my time. I always felt we were like animals waiting for the foreman to call us. After a while, you'd get known.

You were never bored on the docks. Maybe you'd be on a coal boat today digging coal and on a bag boat the next day and then an iron boat or a timber boat. Mostly I was connected with coal work. A ship of 400 tons, there'd be 16 men on that ship in the hatch and four tubs, one man on each tub. We'd all be digging down and putting it into the tub. I was knocked out five times meself by the handles of the tubs, cause you'd tip them up and they'd come around as you'd swing out to empty them.

Oh, you'd be filthy. With coal you got paid tonnage. And your hands got hard. You were told to put urine on your hands and that hardened them up. And afterwards nothing would bother your hands because they'd be solid welts.

We got paid daily in them times. Now Mulligan's Pub, we all used drink there. Most of the time you drank five or six pints before you'd go home. That was normal.

Now containerisation, they got that idea from the last war, the idea of roll-on and rolloff ships. The beginning of the roll freight service. That was the beginning of the end. Oh there was terrible battles in the union. But men like meself knew that if we didn't move with the times we'd be left behind.

Chrissie McAdam (70), Mitchell's Rosary Factory

I was born in Sean McDermott Street. I came out of school when I was 14 and went into Mitchell's straight away. At that time I'd say there was maybe 50 people and most were really old.

The rosary beads were made out of cow horns. Mr Dunleavy'd cut them. He used to be at the back and he used to open the cow horns and flatten them out. And we'd shape all the beads out on the machine. There were different shapes. Like, some were heart shaped. There'd be tiny ones and Communion ones and bigger ones, and little round beads with a little shamrock on them.

Then you'd put all your beads into a box and in the evening we'd go up to the foreman and we'd have our beads in a box and he'd weigh them and see how many pounds you'd have and he'd mark that down on your book. It was piece-work. The rosary beads were sent to all foreign countries.

A cousin of mine used to join the beads and make the whole rosary with a wire. The beads had to be polished first, on a big buffer machine with electricity. And for dyeing them, God, they had every colour. And the crucifix was shaped out by a machine. The cross was made out of cow horn. And then the figure had to be put on. The figure was metal or tin and they used to cut them out and some of the girls used to have to nail them in. A girl would be pressing a lever and they'd cut out all these little figures. And I could do all that!

Dublin Voices: An Oral Folk History, by Kevin C. Kearns is published by Gill & Macmillan, £19.99.