We are celebrating May being Local History Month with this engaging and informative article by Allie Nickell. Allie was a participant on our EastSide Lives project and has always been generous with her research skills and time, we are thrilled she has put this article together about her work developing a One Place Study here in east Belfast. To find out more about her study check out her website.
To mark LGBT+ History Month, our guest blogger Michael Fryer has shared with us the exciting and important work the LGBT Heritage Project Northern Ireland has been doing for the last year as well as uncovering some local east Belfast stories of remarkable LGBT people from the past.
Local Tour Guide and Greenway Leader, Peter McCabe has been reflecting on his top places to walk during lockdowns. He has not only provided us with great ideas for getting out and about (safely of course) but added interesting facts to keep your mind occupied as well as your feet!
Welcome back! it has been a while since our last blog post, but since we are back in lockdown for what we hope will just be a few weeks, we would like to introduce you to another way of engaging with local heritage from your own home. Jason Burke has written this entry for us about his latest foray into creating podcasts. Jason is a prolific researcher, writer and communicator in all things 'Historical Belfast' and if you have missed being able to go on his walking tours lately, here is a new way of engaging with the past in Belfast.
Peter McCabe is delivering several sell-out tours during this year's EastSide Arts Festival. Here, he gives us a taste of what to expect in his tour of Roselawn Cemetery as well as his upcoming book on the same topic. If this whets your appetite there are limited spaces available on the newly added tour date of 16th August.
This blog entry has been written by William Ennis, a writer who attends the Yard Sessions every month in EastSide Visitor Centre. The Yard Sessions were launched by the Thomas Carnduff Society. In this piece, Willliam explains the importance of Carnduff as a poet from a working class Belfast background and how is legacy is not ony his verse but the space he created for others from a similar background to write.
A Wee Mermaid in Helen's Bay
Firstly, I’d like to thank EastSide Partnership and Heritage Officer, Lisa Rea Currie, for the opportunity to be a guest blogger.
Welcome back to part 2 of Searching for the Past with Online Records. Part 1 can be found here. So far, I have been describing the process I used when looking for one of my own ancestors as a method of exploring and demonstrating resources, archives and maps that can be used together to build a bigger picture of someone in the past and how they lived.
This blog post is going to be different to the previous explorations of on-line museum collections. This time it is going to focus on some excellent internet resources that are available to do your own research. It’s also going to be more personal as I’m going to share a process that helped me connect with my family’s past, where I am from and get to the bottom of a mystery I have been trying to work out for over a decade.
For this post we are going to be focussing on a Belfast museum. The Northern Ireland War Memorial Museum is a small museum on Talbot Street. I haven't visited this museum in real life because I had completely wrong assumptions about the stories told there. I believed it was akin to a military history museum and thought it might be one of those places that caters for passionate enthusiasts rather than for someone like myself who is just a bit nosey and likes hearing people’s stories.
Welcome to our second blog entry about online heritage you can access from home. If you missed our first entry, we explored the on-line offerings from National Museums NI and the Linen Hall Library. If you did have a look at their collections, it is worth visiting them again as all our local museums and heritage centres are working hard to make more of their collections available on-line while their buildings are closed.
Welcome to a new series on our blog. For the next wee while it seems we are going to be more reliant on technology than ever, but this doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some ‘old stuff’. I am hoping to create a series of articles that can signpost heritage lovers to some amazing online resources. There will be some resources for absolute beginners and hopefully some surprises for the more seasoned heritage afficionado. The aim is to cover a range of online museum collections, archives, podcasts, social media accounts and other heritage resources.
Confession…I am not a football fan. I was not overly excited about a trip to The Oval, home of Glentoran Football Club. As the heritage officer for EastSide Partnership I thought I should go and see what historical offerings are on our doorstep in east Belfast. I do have the benefit of a family who bleed green, red and black so it was with this sense of doing my job and a good dollop of familial duty we met Sam Robinson the club historian and tour guide for a visit to the iconic sports ground on a rainy February morning.
