Pioneer Day

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

While many of our family remembered the pioneers on the 24th of July and celebrated with a holiday, the team here in Ireland spent another full day in PRONI.  In our own way, we celebrated our pioneer ancestors by looking for their loved ones.

The folks at PRONI are getting to know us, and they are super friendly.  Besides the helpful staff, we've met one lady who was raised in Ireland but now lives in England.  For her three-week holiday every year she comes back to Belfast and spends every day in PRONI.  We are wishing that we had that kind of time, too.  There are so many records to look at, so much to do, and so little time!

Maybe we mentioned this before, but we are documenting everything we've done so that people in the future will not repeat searches that have not proven fruitful.  We will be putting all of this information into a spreadsheet that can be searched.  The spreadsheet, in connection with the PRONI "Guide to Church Records," will be very helpful to future researchers - at least we hope it will.

Rich and Aunt Kathy spent Wednesday researching the McKennas in Fintona, and while they found a William McKenna family, there are no records that tie them to Hugh McKenna or Alice Doogan.  We were hoping that William might prove to be their brother.  Reed combed through the records of St. Anne's cathedral for the children of William McKenna and Mary Ritchie and will continue with that effort until he finishes the microfilm, or his eyes pop out of his head, whichever is first.  Liz is researching the Singletons in the Lisburn area, and a lot of effort will be concentrated there on Thursday.  Kathy finished looking through the microfilm for baptisms in the Clogher area, hoping to find Thomas McKenna's birth (no luck), reviewed the film for Newtonsaville just in case there might be anything related to McKennas there (there wasn't), and then kicked in to help Reed with finding the children of James McKenna and Catherine Doyle in the baptismal records of St. Anne's.  Thus far, Kathy has found a couple of William and Mary's children but none of James and Catherine's.

We are finding the nightly conference calls with the home team to be very useful.  Their added insights and encouragement are priceless.  While coordinating the time differences is a challenge, it is well worth the effort, especially because it helps us to stand back and look at the big picture and helps guide in future steps.

Between PRONI and the conference call, we managed to squeeze in a quick meal at Nando's and a black taxi tour.  Liz and Reed knew what we were getting into, but the rest of us thought we were going on a tour to look at the sights of Belfast.  No.  We learned about "the troubles."  Belfast is a city where they paint their feelings on the sides of buildings, and we saw many of the city's famous murals.  Much of the fighting took place on Shankhill Road, which is where the McKennas resided some of the time, and the Peace Wall was built there.  While it is easy now to move between the two neighborhoods, there is still a distinct difference.  Rich added insight to our tour by pointing out where the McKennas lived.  Very cool.

It's back to PRONI on Thursday for a long day.  It doesn't close until 8:45pm, and so we are going to take advantage of the extra hours.  It's good to remember that when planning for the future.




Sent from my iPad