Friday 15 February 2013

Exploring Your Roots: Invitation to launch event

PRONI is to host ‘Exploring Your Roots’, a family history exhibition on temporary loan from Mid-Antrim Museums Service. It opens on Monday and will run until Friday 15 March.

A launch event will be held on Tuesday 19 February from 1-2pm and PRONI is extending an invitation to the public to attend.

The exhibition will be formally welcomed with an hour of short talks, including an introduction to the exhibition from Jayne Clarke of Mid-Antrim Museums Service and Dr. William Roulston, Ulster Historical Foundation. This will be followed by an introduction to family history sources at PRONI by Dr. Glynn Kelso of PRONI.

Exploring Your Roots looks at the unique resources available for those seeking to find out more about their family history, both in museums and at PRONI. Rate books, burial records and business ledgers can contain useful information such as the names of those who owned land or worked in a particular industry. Family photographs, often contained in faded albums, capture a moment in time. These images can be explored to show how people lived and worked in earlier times.

Photographs, maps, documents and artefacts held by museums help to place our ancestors in their day-to-day world.

While it is exciting to discover the name of an ancestor in museum records, it can be equally interesting just to explore the world in which people lived in the past.

The exhibition was designed to offer a flavour of the diverse collections held within the Mid-Antrim Museums Service and to offer people a source of reference or context for the items they may find at home.

If you would like to join PRONI at the launch, please telephone Tel: (+44) 028 90 534800 or email to secure your place.