6/21/96 (Belfast) Sitting in the waiting room at PRONI (Public Records Office of Northern Ireland), after about a 50-minute hike to get here. It was through very pleasant, prosperous neighborhoods with lots of parks, but at one point along the walk I saw something I saw several of yesterday, a regular feature of the Belfast landscape but peculiar in such a neighborhood: a fortified army post scrunched in among the houses and greeting them on all sides with chain-link and barbed wire. I was daunted also to find that the PRONI itself was such a fortress, and I stood forlornly looking at the building across a thick steel gate that came up to my nose, until a guard I hadn't seen emerged from his stronghold and opened the gate for me and quite cheerfully showed me the way, after confiscating my backpack. Procedures inside have been mostly the same combination of helpfulness and paranoid caution (the woman at the outside desk wondered if the people inside would allow me to carry papers in an ordinary manila folder, but figured it was all right since it was open on three sides!), and so far (I'm writing this piecemeal during breaks in the action) the search itself has been very frustrating, as the procedure results in loading a microfilm that is totally unmarked and unindexed into a very low-quality machine, then having to scroll through pages of largely illegible parish records of 300-odd years ago until I come to a town name I'm looking for. And as each separate microfilm is just a guess at the possible record anyway, to have to spend so much time just getting to the right place on it is very annoying.
And now, as I have lunch in the little mobile-home canteen conveniently set up inside the compound, I'll catch up on earlier days:
. . . Wednesday, 6/19, was basically a travel day, not even intended to be particularly interesting (the landscape is generally less spectacular in the north), but it turned out to be a day when I gained a much fuller understanding of where I came from. We crossed the border at Strabane in County Tyrone, where the Clarks emigrated from--and also not far from the McGrew homeplace. The much-anticipated border crossing was a non-event. There were heavily fenced guard towers and speed bumps to slow the traffic to a crawl, but no guards at street level at all. Strabane has been a tense and violent place in recent years, and the sight of a courthouse so heavily fortified that you could just see the very top was strikingly incongruous in what otherwise appeared to be a happy, bustling market town. I checked on protestant churches, but none had graveyards, and there is no Quaker meeting house at present. There are tons of Clarkes listed in the phone book as farmers in Northern Ireland, but no one I asked knew any, except one who knew of Clarkes farming out in Castlederg, not far away. We stayed through lunch in Strabane and then returned to the van. I was taking pictures of the C. of I. church we had parked next to (just in case they would prove relevant), and Tom and Bill started taking pictures of the heavily fortified police barracks across the street, when the guard on duty hustled over and made them stop. He was clearly supposed to confiscate the film, but he just as clearly didn't want to be so extreme, and he just spent several minutes in very genial conversation, perhaps making sure we were nothing more than we said we were.
The next stop was something I had not heard of before spotting it while tracing our route that same morning, but it was one of the most interesting things I've seen on the trip: the Ulster-American Folk Park and museum. Built around the boyhood home of whichever Mellon it was that went to America and amassed the huge fortune in banking, the park does a good job of representing Ulster life in the 18th and 19th centuries, then having you move down a Londonderry "street" to the docks, enter a mock-up of the kind of sailing ship the early emigrants came on (which is actually under a grassy mound separating the two parts of the park), and then come out on the "docks" in America and quickly move to life in the Pennsylvania countryside, including a replica of the log home Mellon helped build with his family. Since this replicates rather closely the experience of many of my Ulster ancestors (except for amassing the fortune, of course), it was particularly fascinating to me, but everyone in the group seemed pleased with this sort of "reverse Ellis Island." The museum was also extremely informative, and well done. Incidentally, it is probably helpful for us to know that the reason Mellon and so many others emigrated was that the Irish custom (unlike primogeniture in England) was to divide a family farm evenly among all surviving offspring, which very quickly led to diminishing returns if somebody didn't find a way to produce more land--so in this instance it was the more enterprising members of families who saw the opportunity to shift their farming skills to BIG hunks of land in the new world.
. . . Now returning to the Friday I spent in the PRONI, let me
just sum up by saying it was extremely frustrating, and it turned out
to
be a mistake to depend on the librarian who was guiding me from the
start.
She steered me, logically enough, to church records of baptisms,
marriages,
and burials--all on microfilm--but they have contrived to do for those
parish registers roughly what is done to the Lost Ark at the end of
Raiders
Of: by transferring all to microfilm and putting the originals out of
reach,
they have "preserved" them out of existence, for any practical purpose.
The records, of course, were in poor shape to begin with, but someone
looking
at the original and using a magnifying glass could at least get what
was
there to be got. But after slipshod photography, and with lousy
machines
for reading, one is hopeless to get any "closer" to what's on the page.
On top of that, the microfilm rolls are not indexed at all--or even
well-marked
as you scroll through--and they contain both more than the specific
catalogue
item sought (i.e. many other items listed elsewhere in the catalogue)
and
less of that particular item than the catalogue said should be there.
All
in all, a pointless exercise that I gave too much time to before
turning,
late in the day, to a loose-ended method of browsing through an
extensive
"personal name" file, which was random but far more interesting in the
leads it offered, including a number of Quaker marriage certificates,
notice
of an Alexander Clarke who was sent to America in a prison ship in 1798
(could it be? Naw.), and an 1876 power of attorney form sent from
"Chas.
Clark of Ohio" to a presumed relative in Ulster--I will check that out
further, through the mail.