We started the day with a visit to the Belfast City Cemetery. Rich had pulled a list of locations of the burial sites of many family members, and it was our goal to locate each and every one. What we thought would take an hour to an hour and a half turned into a three-hour project. We started with a visit to the cemetery office where a really nice girl helped us locate the plots on a map. With photos of the maps on Rich's phone and a spring in our step, we ventured forth. Finding them wasn't as easy as we thought, though, and thankfully Rich has a VERY cheap data plan so he was able to call back and forth with the office until we located all of the plots. It probably was annoying the girl in the office a tremendous amount, but she sounded very kind on the phone. If we had had a box of chocolates, we'd have given it to her as a thank you. The big find at the cemetery was that there was a headstone on one of the graves! John and Elizabeth McKenna had placed a headstone for their son, John, who died when he was 25. They are also buried in that plot, but no one put up a headstone for them. Something for us to do, right? By the way, we found no other headstones. Rich and Reed gathered the GPS coordinates for each of the sites, and we took pictures as well.
We ate lunch in Belfast's oldest pub, White's, and then returned to PRONI for our final mad push. We worked frantically until they closed. Reed kept the collection desk busy buying copy cards - they couldn't believe how much we were copying. I think they liked the business, though, and the folks were so kind. We all love PRONI, and it was hard to leave.
We made it to Portrush about 10:30, and shortly before 11:00 several of us went to Mr. Chips for fish and chips. It really hit the spot! Liz said it was "too late to eat," and Rich said "it's NEVER too late to eat." Everyone got what they wanted.
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