The Mid-Antrim Museums Service is running a family history roadshow titled ‘Exploring Your Roots’. It is a series of seven lectures running over six weeks at various times and the topics, while obviously relevant to family history, would be equally useful to the local historian. They’ve really got a fantastic lineup: William Roulston from the UHF is speaking on ‘Researching Farming Families’, Kay Muhr, who worked on the placenames project, on ‘Townlands and Placenames’ and Paddy Fitzgerald, from the Ulster American Folk Park will be introducing DIPPAM, an online archive of documents relating to Irish migration. There’s a tour of a local graveyard, an introduction to online sources and a presentation by the local history society. And, kicking things off is PRONI’s Ann McVeigh with a talk about family records there. It sounds incredibly useful, and, if I may say, an excellent complement to our lecture series at PRONI. They have concentrated on topics which we just couldn’t get to, and focused more on online sources than we’ve been able to do. I’m hoping to get to a few.
The roadshow is on at The Braid in Ballymena from 10 Nov – 6 December 2011. However, if you want to catch the full series, it will be running at Mossley Mill in Newtownabbey from 16 Jan – 24 Feb 2012 and in Larne Museum and Arts Centre from 3 Sept – 12 Oct 2012.
For more information go to www.thebraid.com or contact Shirin Murphy at shirin.murphyATballymena.gov.uk.