Nojomo 5 – PRONI Disaster

 In the morning my Uncle John and I took Cassie to the soft play opposite his house. We don’t take Cassie to the soft play very often and the one in my village is very small and not very good. This one was enormous. We were lucky to stumble upon the toddler session, which meant two hours for £1.50. Cassie didn’t want to go on the little playframe with all the babies but really didn’t know what to make of the big play frame. I kept ending up having to climb up myself and encouraging her to go down the slide. It’s interesting because she’s usually really brave, she runs and climbs and explores and enjoys the slides  like the best of them when it’s the great outdoors but it seemed like soft play is a little out of her comfort zone. I’ve said to Dan we really should take her more when the weathers bad but he doesn’t really like them. 

In the afternoon the plan was for my dad and Siobhan to take Cassie for a few hours and give me time on my own with my uncle John. I was a bit wary about it because of how Cassie had been behaving but my dad assured me that he could handle it. I thought maybe it would be good for her to spend time with my dad and Siobhan without me there so she’d have to bond with them. It sounds harsh but she’s been with them before and she’s usually fine, so I’d wondered whether it was because I was there that was prompting some of her behaviour. She went off with my dad willingly enough and informed me she was going to have a little sleep in her car seat, but was giving Siobhan really bad looks. 

My Uncle John and I went to PRONI, the public records office in Belfast, to do some family tree research. We parked in the Titanic quarter, so we walked through the ground level of where you go to see the exhibition. It looks really good but very expensive – £14.90! I’d like to go see it but I know Dan would like to go too, so I’d rather save it for when we can go together. Chances are we’ll be going back to Ireland in the near future to see family. I did see out in the docks the boat that took passengers from land to board the Titanic, thanks to the National Lottery fund it’s being fixed up and will soon be allowing tourists to board. I am really interested in the Titanic, for those of you who don’t know the Titanic was built in the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast. I have an ancestor on my dads side who worked for Harland and Wolff as a labourer at the time the Titanic was being built, so chances are he was involved in the actual construction of it. 

Proni is located opposite the Titanic building. I had to fill in an application form and get my photo taken for an ID card before I was allowed to go in and search the records. I had to get one in my maiden name because my passport hasn’t been changed and it was weird signing in my old signature! 

The records office was a bit of an experience. It looked a bit like a University library. I had to use a microfilm reader, which I’d never used before, they are a bit of a faff aren’t they? Parish records are quite hard to read and I didn’t find a document but by process of elimination I discovered that an ancestor had not been baptised in the parish I thought he had, which means the family probably came in from the neighbouring parish. 

Just as I was getting really into my research, a man came in from the PRONI desk and we were told we needed to go back downstairs. We’d had to lock our phones and methods of communication into lockers and my dad had to come into PRONI and ask them to come find us. Cassie had not stopped crying for the entire time and after an hour and twenty minutes they gave up and came to find us. She was just screaming over and over again "I WANT MY MUMMY!" Bless them, they’d taken her to the beach, she’d shouted, they’d taken her to get an ice cream, she’d shouted and they’d even taken her to the toy shop…she’d still shouted. So my nice time researching with my Uncle John was cut short. When I got into the car, Cassie broke into this big beaming smile and said simply "Mummy! You came back!" 

We were all very embarrassed about it. I felt awful because Siobhan wasn’t staying the full week, she was flying back that night and all Cassie had down was be horrible! Siobhan obviously felt awkward because it was her my daughter had a vendetta against and my dad was embarrassed and a little disappointed that he couldn’t calm her down. 

Cassie was absolutely fine at Uncle Johns, he made spaghetti for tea which was a big hit. She went to bed okay. My Uncle John and I stayed up late again, discussing our family tree and the skeletons in the closet. We discovered that somebody else on Ancestry had added my mum and dad to their family tree and had put that they had 6 kids! So we had a little laugh, sending that person an email asking them to enlighten me about the 3 siblings I knew nothing about!