Week of Welcomes: 26th June to 2nd July 2011
The Ireland Reaching Out (Ireland XO/IRO) project is an initiative for the economic, social and cultural development of the Irish people both at home and abroad. It is based on a simple idea; instead of waiting for people of Irish descent to come home to Ireland to trace their roots, local Irish parish communities go the other way. At a townland, village and parish level, local Irish communities identify who left their neighbourhoods, and trace them and their descendant worldwide, proactively engaging with them and inviting them to become part of an extended virtual community with their place of origin.
The project is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Philanthropies, and by local government, national heritage and volunteer agencies. Through 2011, the area of South-East Galway has been designated as the national pilot project area and will host the inaugural „Week of Welcomes”. The week is part of the pilot project which will soon become a major nationwide initiative with a website at www.irelandXO.org
You can search the index at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/bnl/
Compiled by John C. Greene
Please acknowledge the assistance of The Belfast NewsletterIndex in resulting publications. Such acknowledgement may help to procure funding for future indexing of Irish newspapers.
A Brief History:
The Belfast Newsletter, an Irish newspaper that began publication in Belfast in 1737 and continues in business until this day, has good claim to being the oldest continually-published English-language newspaper. This is the first such index to be completed for an Irish newspaper. The Belfast Newsletter was published thrice-weekly during the 18th century, in issues of four pages each. During its time, the Newsletter was seldom equalled in the breadth and quality of its coverage of local and international events.
Every significant word and date in the 20,000 surviving pages of the newspaper was indexed, but not all of the newspapers are still available. In fact, only about one-quarter of the newspapers for the years from 1737 to 1750 have survived, although the run of newspapers is nearly complete from 1750 through 1800 (Click here for a list of surviving newspapers). The final database of information contains nearly 300,000 items of news and advertisements.
You can now look up burial records online using our search facility.
The service allows you to search for burial records in Belfast from 1869 onwards. Around 360,000 records are available relating to:
- Belfast City Cemetery – records from 1869 (including the Jewish, public and Glenalina extension sections)
- Roselawn Cemetery – records from 1954
- Dundonald Cemetery – records from 1905.
You can use the search facility to view, where available, the folllowing information about the deceased:
- 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.
The service is useful if you are interested in tracing your family history, carrying out larger genealogy or historical searches, or trying to locate a grave (for example, a funeral director or monumental sculptor).
Other cemeteries
The search facility does not currently include burial records for the following cemeteries:
- Balmoral Cemetery
- Clifton Street Graveyard
- Friar’s Bush Graveyard
- Knock Burial Ground
- Shankill Graveyard.
If you are looking for records for these graveyards, call our Cemeteries and Crematorium Central Office on 028 9027 0296 or email cemeteries@belfastcity.gov.uk for further help and advice.
Please note that they do not look after, or hold records for, Milltown Cemetery or Knockbreda Cemetery.
For more information, call Milltown Cemetery on 028 9061 3972 or Knockbreda Cemetery on 028 9049 4500.
A new, free, web resource we will be launching at at Queen’s University this month, which may be of interest to everyone.
The resource is a searchable virtual library called ‘DIPPAM: Documenting Ireland – Parliament, People and Migration’, and it brings together into an accessible form and enhances three existing resources - EPPI – the Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland 1800-1922; the IED – Irish Emigration Database, containing runs of emigrant letters, newspaper extracts and other emigration-related materials for the 18th-early 20th centuries; and VMR – Voices of Migration and Return – a collection of 90 interviews with 20th century Ulster migrants.
This resource has been created by a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast, University of Ulster, the Centre for Migration Studies (Omagh) and Libraries NI, and funded by the AHRC, and can be accessed via the webpage http://www.dippam.ac.uk . The resource will be fully operational from about 9 March, and we have a number of regional workshops scheduled this month and a launch event at QUB on 21 March.
Background to the Covenant
The Covenant Trail
Preparations
Ulster Day
Aftermath
Search hints & tips
Viewing and printing images
Data Amendments