PRONI research visits

A quick announcement to say that following a successful client trip to Belfast a couple of days back, I am now hoping to make monthly day trip visits to PRONI (www.proni.gov.uk) from my home here in the west of Scotland to carry out both client based and personal research. If you have Scottish based family (or based elsewhere) who originally came from Ulster, and need some look ups from records over there, do drop me a note. It's as easy for me to get to Belfast from the west of Scotland as it is to visit Edinburgh, and actually costs the same in terms of travel.

Bear in mind that a great deal of material is online (see my new book Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet for info on that), but in some cases it may be much cheaper to hire a researcher to go through the microfilm records rather than pay a small fortune with certain online records providers. A great many parish and other vital records are also not yet available online. There are of course many other records that can be consulted, including rental rolls, estate papers, and much more.

A list of PRONI's church records that can be consulted on microfilm is available at at www.proni.gov.uk/guide_to_church_records.pdf, and PRONI's catalogue is at http://applications.proni.gov.uk/LL_DCAL_PRONI_ECATNI/SearchPage.aspx. For details of my research services visit www.scotlandsgreateststory.co.uk.

If you wish to visit PRONI yourself, and I would thoroughly encourage you to do so (magic place!), have a gander at my other blog for a recent post about how it all works - see http://walkingineternity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/a-grand-day-out-research-at-proni-in.html.

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...!