Ulster Folk & Transport Museum

The collection of oral history and narrative for the archive of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum (National Museums Northern Ireland) during 2007 included a series of interviews conducted by Linda Ballard to document the work and activities of several people invited to participate in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s programme featuring Northern Ireland. These audio interviews are accompanied by extensive photographic records made for the archive of the Museum. Topics covered include millinery, embroidery, lace making, Irish dance dress making, banner painting and eel fishing. While the focus is on oral history, some interviews also include narrative material relevant to the study of belief systems.

An interview was also conducted with story teller Mick Quinn, who attended the Folklife Festival, recording traditional aspects of his narrative repertoire. In terms of the archive more generally, work is under way to produce digitised transcripts of interviews together with digitised indexes to these transcripts. These resources are being made available through study facilities at the museum.

The audio archive held at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum houses 18,000 recordings made by BBC Northern Ireland and almost 5,000 Irish language recordings made by Radio Telefis Eireann. It also includes the Living Linen Archive of oral recordings documenting the history of the Ulster linen industry in the twentieth century. Further information about the archive is available here.

Northern Ireland Migration Narratives

This project is a partnership initiative organised by the Centre for Migration Studies (based at the Ulster American Folk Park) and the School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast under the direction of Johanne Devlin Trew. It is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2006-08) and the HEA North South Programme for Collaborative Research, Strand 1 (2004-06).

‘Life narrative’ interviews were conducted during 2004-2007 with more than 90 migrants from Northern Ireland, both returned and not returned, who responded to advertisements placed in a variety of publications and electronic media. Participants represented a variety of class backgrounds and geographic origins within Northern Ireland, and were evenly distributed between the two major denominational groups (Catholic and Protestant), exhibiting varying degrees of personal religiosity (e.g. from devout to secular); and in the case of Protestants, care was taken to include representation of denominational groups.

Since the researcher was aware of the lack of Irish migration research relating to Northern Protestants, the research targeted areas where Protestants comprise a significant proportion of the Irish migrant group: England (Liverpool and London), Scotland (Glasgow – Edinburgh belt) and Canada (Toronto and Southern Ontario). The focus of the research was to interview primarily people still of an age to participate in the workforce, and emphasis was particularly placed on those who had migrated during the 1970s and 1980s, decades of intense upheaval in Northern Ireland.

Since the life narrative or biographical approach was taken in the research, the interviews cover the individual’s life from birth through adulthood, and a specific effort was made to gather memories of childhood, much of this located in the pre-civil rights era. As such, the interviews stand as important and unique documents of the social history of Northern Ireland as well as of Northern Irish migration specifically, and thus will be of interest to researchers in a wide variety of disciplines.

The interviews are housed in the ‘Narratives of Migration and Return Oral Archive’, which features an SQL database that allows keyword searchable access across the entire interview corpus to individual track level (2-3 minute intervals) of streamed audio (over 300 hours of audio). The pilot database is currently operational and will, upon completion, be made available to the public via the Internet.

Linda Ballard