Wednesday 7 August 2013

More on recent PRONI User Forum meeting

I recently blogged about the last PRONI User Forum held on Friday 21st June in Belfast - see http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/proni-user-forum-news-highlights-from.html. I've just received the formal minutes, with a few other bits and bobs that may be of interest.

The recently obtained Londonderry Papers (records of the Stewart family of Mount Stewart), one of PRONI's most major acquisitions in years, is currently being catalogued - it is expected that it will not be until next year that this catalogue will become available (and expect this to take a while to be fully catalogued, it's a massive collection!). Other cataloguing includes the recently completed catalogue of Prison Internee files from 1972 -1975, and progress on the Clanmorris and the Perceval-Maxwell Papers.

One of the thing that I asked about was whether PRONI had an equivalent of the National Register of Archives and the National Register of Archives for Scotland, which can be useful in locating material not held by a national archive body, but at least its existence and location identified and recorded - these include details in particular of other archives such as business archives, personal estate papers in private hands, etc. At this stage unfortunately, PRONI does not have an equivalent for Northern Ireland (there's no policy to do so), but PRONI will obviously advise if any such knowledge is held by staff upon enquiry. (The equivalents on the mainland are accessible at www.nas.gov.uk/onlineRegister/ and http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/ and are extremely useful).

(With thanks to Gavin McMahon)

Chris

My new book, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet, is now available from Pen and Sword. My Scottish land and church records ebooks are available at http://www.gen-ebooks.com/unlock-the-past.html, whilst my next Pharos Scottish course, Scottish Research Online, starts Sep 4th - see http://pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=102. Time to smash a few brick walls...!

No comments:

Post a Comment