taggerty

After a wonderful diversion via Bolzano, Italy and Innsbruck, Austria, I’m actually here in Belfast. I’ve spent two days at the Public Records Office (PRONI) now. I’m afraid Belfast strikes me as rather bleak and grim, though it could be mainly that PRONI is in the Titanic quarter where the extensive shipyards used to be, largely a wasteland now, with a huge new stadium, flash new PRONI, and (yes, they built it here) the Titanic museum. My hotel is very comfortable with a view over St Anne’s Square in the Cathedral Quarter, over the river from PRONI. All I’ve done so far (apart from persuading KLM to find my suitcase which they left in Amsterdam – it did turn up, 24 hours after I did) is work all day, and in the evenings try to find a cheap dinner. So far the pubs are best.

After two days I’ve worked out the system at PRONI, but haven’t made much progress yet towards establishing the relationship between Archibald Beatty of Farnamullan and James Beatty of Aghavoory. There are certainly many thousands of documents in the Colebrook Estate records, but most of them are after 1850 and too late to tell us which Archibald Beatty was the father of James of Aghavoory. I’ve found a couple of coloured maps of James’ farm, so if I go to Fermanagh I should be able to see if the birthplace of James Beatty of Ballina/South Yarra (1842-1903) is still there. I was going to put one in to add colour to this post, but I’m too tired to work out how to convert it from PDF and I don’t have the “snip” tool that’s on my computer at home.

I found one map of Aghavoory from 1787 which could have been very useful. It shows Mrs Moore at farm No 1, which was leased by Price Moore in the 19th century. It also shows 4a and b and 10,later leased by James Beatty, but they belong to a Robert McKnight, so we still don’t know how James acquired them.

More tomorrow.