Irish Family History

I’m very excited about the launch of findmypast.ie today, a joint venture between brightsolid and Eneclann, the company I work for.  More information about it on the brightsolid website.

As a researcher, I was really excited that the Landed  Estates Court records are now accessible online - even more so because my great-great grandfather was among the 500,000 tenants included in this database.

Anyway - just a short post as today’s a busy day - take a look at the new website for yourself, and leave a post here, or on the fmp.ie facebook page if you find any long-lost ancestors!

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland or PRONI’s  new state-of-the-art offices will be opening to everyone from 9.00am tomorrow, Wednesday 30th March 2011.

The offices are located at 2 Titanic Boulevard, Titanic Quarter, Belfast, BT3 9HQ

PRONI opening hours:
Mon - Wed & Fri 9.00 am - 4.45 pm, Thursday 10.00 am - 8.45 pm
Last requests for documents 4.15 pm (6.30 pm Thursdays)

The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure issued the following press release:

‘The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) will be reopening to the public on Wednesday 30 March 2011 when staff look forward to welcoming customers old and new.

This is the culmination of a major project which commenced when the Northern Ireland Executive in 2007 committed nearly £30 million for the construction of a new purpose-built record office.

Director of PRONI, Aileen McClintock said “In September 2010, we reported that the new PRONI headquarters was due to open in May or June 2011, following the removal and relocation of over 40km of unique and irreplaceable, documents. To have opened ahead of schedule is an outstanding achievement which reflects the careful planning, dedication and hard work of PRONI staff and our partners.”

“The new record office will provide larger, better and modern facilities for accessing PRONI’s records. Our mission is Protecting and Providing Archives for All and by accessing these wonderful new facilities as well as our web-based resources, visitors will have the opportunity to experience a greater awareness of Northern Ireland’s archival cultural heritage.”

Facilities in the new building are impressive. The new Public Search Room is double the size of its predecessor at Balmoral Avenue and makes provision for sixty seats comprising 52 computer desks (one of which is height adjustable for disabled users) and eight large format desks. Also incorporated into the Search Room are 22 microfilm readers - two of which are microfilm printers. The Reading Room is no less impressive and provides for 78 seats (compared to 44 at Balmoral Avenue), the majority of which have access to power for laptop users. Of these 78, two are electric height adjustable for disabled users, and eight are large format ‘map’ tables. In addition PRONI has introduced a self service camera facility for digital copying.

The opening exhibition entitled A Century of Change, Conflict and Transformation, 1911-2011, uses archives to explore the development of themes in Northern Ireland during this period including Home and Leisure, the Economy and Sport. At the core of the exhibition will be a central display focusing on the 70th anniversary of the Blitz in Northern Ireland.

‘PRONI@TQ’ is an iconic building, sustainable for the future in terms of fabric, maintenance and archival deposits and is located one mile from Belfast City Centre near the Odyssey entertainment complex. Other amenities in the area include the Titanic Signature Project (due to open in April 2012), the restoration of the Titanic and Olympic slipways, the restoration of the Nomadic - the tug boat which took travellers to the Titanic, Belfast Metropolitan College (due to open in September 2011), Paint Hall Film Studio, apartments, a hotel and the Northern Ireland Science Park. Accessible via bus, rail, road and approximately five minutes away from George Best Belfast City Airport, it is hoped that PRONI’s new building and facilities will encourage wider access to archives in the local community, as well as bringing cultural tourists keen to visit Northern Ireland.’

I’m looking forward to a trip to the new offices soon - if you get a chance to go there and have any comments or photos of the new building, do share them here.

The “New Guinea”
courtesy of www.searlecanada.org

I was searching through the Registers of Immigrants Ships’ Arrivals (Queensland, Australia), 1848-1912 on Monday and was delighted to find my great-great-great-granduncle who arrived in Brisbane in 1885 at the age of 21 on the ship “New Guinea”.  (I hadn’t actually gone to that source to look for him, but whenever I am looking at a new source I always have a quick look under all the main surnames I am researching in case an ancestor is hiding there!  So I was extremely excited to find him, as the last I knew he was living in Ireland in the early 1880s.)

According to the excellent website the Shipslist, ‘the New Guinea was built by Doxford, Sunderland in 1884 for McIlwraith, McEacharn & Co.of Melbourne. She was a 2,674 gross ton, iron built steamer, single screw with a speed of 11 knots. On 16/6/1885 she commenced her first sailing from London to Batavia and Brisbane. She started her last voyage on this service on 13/5/1889 and in 1911 was wrecked on Green Cape, NSW’.  Batavia is the name by which Jakarta, Indonesia was known at this time.

I’m going to order a copy of the passenger list to find out more. G-g-g-granduncle was a farmer in Ireland, and unmarried so he may have had an assisted passage.  The lists cost A$12.50, so I am looking forward to seeing what other information I can glean.  For instance, I would be interested to see whether he travelled over alone, or with friends or relations from the same area.

Next I looked at the online birth, marriage and death information for Queensland to see if I could find a likely marriage, birth of children and death.  There was only one marriage that tied in, and there were four children to this marriage, after which my ancestor died at the age of just 30.  The search for deaths gives parents’ names so I’m sure this is my ancestor, but I won’t add anything to my tree without documentary evidence, so I’ve decided to order the relevant birth, marriage and death certificates.

Mind you, I couldn’t believe that each certificate costs A$35 to order! This works out at approximately €25 or £20 which seems pretty steep to me.  For the sake of completeness, I have filled out the forms and am going to send them off tomorrow - hopefully for this price I’ll get the certificates back pretty quickly, and find some other clues to help me trace the family into the 20th century to see if there are any living relatives in Australia still.

I don’t think there is any alternative to paying this amount - according to the FamilySearch wiki on Queensland BMDs ‘There is no transcription service or other low-cost way for family historians to obtain the information in the register other than to purchase the official BDM certificate’.

Anyway, will report back on how I get on.  This is the first person in my tree that I have discovered who went to Australia so it’s exciting stuff!  If any Australian genealogists have any tips, let me know!

This lovely card posted in 1915 from Dublin to Liverpool says it all - Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone, near and far!

A new Irish family history and genealogy website, findmypast.ie,  is going to be launching sometime in the near future!

Aimed at the 80 million people worldwide with Irish roots, this exciting new venture is aimed at those with Irish ancestry or who are interested in Irish history.

findmypast.ie have set up an Irish blog announcing that an all-new collection of millions of Irish historical and genealogical records will be coming soon, which will be added to on a regular basis.

To ensure you’re one of the first to know when this new site launches you can sign up to receive emails from findmypast.ie

Gavin Gavin McMahon of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) reports that a major new update to the Name Search facility was launched on 11th March on the PRONI website.

He writes that ‘Eight further pre-1858 will indexes have been added, containing around 53,000 new entries and the index to coroners’ inquests has been extended by ten years to 1920.

These entries are in addition to the pre-1858 administration bond indexes, fragments of the 1740 and 1766 religious census returns and 1775 dissenters petitions already available on Name Search. The application now provides a searchable index to thousands of records as early as 1608. The new indexes cover the dioceses of Armagh, Clogher, Connor, Down and Kilmore. Given the loss of census records for Ireland prior to 1901, these records will be of great interest to genealogists tracing their family tree as far back as the 17th century.

Although most pre-1858 wills do not survive, the indexes provide information of use to genealogists, such as the names of the deceased, their address, the date of the grant of probate or administration and occasionally their occupation. Previously users would have to come to PRONI and spend considerable time searching these indexes. Now they are available anywhere in the world and can be searched in seconds.

The completion of this major project is a valuable addition to PRONI’s online resources and a mark of its commitment to helping make the archives available to everyone.’

The site can be accessed via PRONI’s main website at www.proni.gov.uk.

As part of a project launched at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, more than 6,000 historical photographs, portraits and political prints from over 100 years ago have been digitised and are now on sale through the Belfast Telegraph website.

The images, which date from c. 1800 - 1900 cover a wide range of themes from family photos, architecture, sports, politics, industry and landscapes.

The project means that not only are the images available to a wider audience, but the images themselves can be better conserved as the originals do not have to be on display.

I had a quick look through the site, to see if I could find any postcards of Antrim Town that I did not already have in my own collection. There were a few, but it would have been easier to look through them if:

(1)  each picture had a tag so that when you hover over it you can tell without having to click on it - the images are quite small so it is not always apparent from the search results page what the image is of

(2) there were a way of opening up one picture to full size in search results and then being able to move forward through all the pictures at full size

The postcards are priced between £10 and £50 and can be reproduced as prints, A3 posters or on mugs.

To view collection and purchase any images, visit www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/postcards.

Today I was forwarded a link to the online Belfast City Council Burial Records. The council currently holds information for 8 Belfast Cemeteries in large registers and burial order books in their Cemeteries and Crematorium Central Office, located in Belfast City Hall. However, they have been digitising these records and now records from three Belfast cemeteries are online.

Since I have ancestors from Co. Antrim, some of whom lived in Belfast itself, I have been enjoying browsing these records this evening.  I found records relating to second cousins twice removed, who I had located on the 1901 and 1911 census, but I was not sure when or where they had died. The online burial records have helped me to piece together the family tree - my aim being to trace these collateral lines forward to the present, so I can contact living relatives to see if they have any more nuggets of information about the family.

The online burial records only commence in 1869 so are most useful for research into more recent family or into collateral lines, as I am doing (for earlier records, go to PRONI - or take a look at the PRONI cemetery records leaflet).

There are approximately 360,000 records online at the Belfast City Burial Records website at the moment and these relate to:

- Belfast City Cemetery, 1869 onwards (including Jewish, public & Glenalina extension sections)
- Roselawn Cemetery, 1954 onwards
- Dundonald Cemetery, 1905 onwards

The search engine is easy to use, but only returns 5 entries per page, so it’s important to make use of the next button! If you want to skip ahead a few pages just click on the drop-down highlighting the page you want to look for and wait for that page to load - don’t click anything while you are waiting!

The information returned includes:
* full name
* age
* last place of residence
* sex
* date of death
* date of burial
* cemetery they are interred in
* grave section and number
* type of burial, for example, standard earth burial or cremation.

I found the last place of residence really useful, as the family in Belfast had moved around quite frequently between the various records I had already consulted. I’ll now order one or two of the civil death records to see if I can get any more information on family members (hopefully a relative was the informant).

The council is responsible for 8 cemeteries in total; the five remaining cemeteries are Balmoral Cemetery, Clifton Street Graveyard, Friar’s Bush Graveyard, Knock Burial Ground, and Shankill Graveyard.  According to the website, the records for these cemeteries should go online in the future.

Just back from a busy few days at Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE 2011, which was held in London’s Olympia.  It was great to meet so many people who are interested in tracing their Irish Roots as well as catching up with some familiar faces from the world of genealogy.

Those of you tracing ancestors with Donegal roots will be interested to know that the Irish Family History Foundation has added 90,000 civil death records and 6,500 new birth records to their Donegal records.