#proni

MAKASSAR, GOSULSEL.COM - Aksi kemanusiaan terlihat ketika Makassar terkena banjir parah pada Senin (14/02/2023) lalu. Salah satunya yang dilakukan kelompok pecinta alam, PRONI. Sebanyak 30 anggota PRONI membantu korban banjir yang terjebak di rumah masing-masing di Jalan Veteran Utara,...

http://gosulsel.com/2023/02/22/kelompok-pecinta-alam-proni-bantu-evakuasi-korban-banjir-parah-di-makassar/

"Sheep Stealers from the North of England” - The Riding Clans in Ulster - a presentation by Robert Bell, author of The Book of Ulster Surnames, from PRONI and Ulster Historical Foundation.

The Book of Ulster Surnames, which was originally published by Blackstaff Press in 1988, has been out of print for many years. As it was such an important book for researching families, UHF have worked with the author Robert Bell to make it available again. This new edition is an exploration of the meaning and history of over 500 different family names and where they originated from.

In his presentation, Robert will talk about how his ancestors, the Bells, and many other families are descended from the Riding Clans of the Scots Borders, and how they came to be crucial to the success of the seventeenth century Plantation.

Robert Bell was born in Belfast in 1953. He left school at 16 and worked in a variety of jobs in Belfast and Oldham, Lancashire, before returning in 1979 to read Modern History at Queen’s University, Belfast. From 1984 to 1994, he worked in the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, as Supervisor of the Northern Ireland Political Collection. He has had short stories, travel pieces and historical articles published in Ireland, England, Thailand and Bosnia.

From 1994 to his retirement in 2015, he worked as a writer and editor for various development organisations in Bangkok, Sarajevo and Copenhagen, including the International Organisation for Migration and UNICEF. He lives in Denmark.

This event will take place on zoom. The zoom link will also issue one hour before the beginning of the event.

Today we spent the day at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (also known as PRONI).

Before the Irish Civil War, all of Ireland’s records were sent to Dublin. However, the Dublin Records Office was a casualty of the Irish Civil War, and burned down in 1922.  PRONI was founded a year later, and was one of the first offices established in Northern Ireland. PRONI is both the national and local records office in Northern Ireland.  While a public records office, PRONI has both public and private records.  They had to do a lot of rebuilding of the records collection in their first few years, relying heavily on church records. But the Troubles led to a rush to bring materials to PRONI. To this day, they are still behind on cataloging all of materials brought in during the Troubles.

PRONI has a collection of audiovisual recordings as part of the Prisons Memory Archive.  The recordings were done at the former Armagh and the Maze/Long Kesh prisons, where many political prisoners were held during the Troubles. Participants include former prisoners, wardens, priests/pastors, visitors, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and more. The Prisons Memory Archive has an ethical framework of co-ownership, life storytelling, and inclusivity. 38 participants have their interviews posted on to the website, www.prisonsmemoryarchive.com.

We talked a great deal about archiving in Northern Ireland, PRONI’s process for digital archiving, how PRONI operates, and had a ‘behind the scenes’ tour to see their stacks, the conservation room, and their reprographics suite (where they work with old photographs).

Most importantly, we got registered with PRONI so that we can request items from the collection and enter their search and reading rooms. These are good for 10 years, so having one seems like a good excuse to come back to Ireland!

Not a lot of photos today, but I did get a few good ones!