Verbal Magazine

Touring the Special Collections

The Folk Park, situated 5 miles north of Omagh on the main A5 road between Omagh and Strabane, is a well-known and popular visitor attraction exploring the history of the two million and more people who left this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in search of better lives abroad. 

The Centre for Migration Studies supports the Folk Park’s main activities by providing reference resources on Irish Migration worldwide from 1600 to the present and particularly on the history of both the United States and Ireland and the links between the two countries over the centuries.

The Centre was established in its present form in 1998 and comprises a Library and the Emigration Database Project, begun in 1988.  The part-time degree in Irish Migration Studies, taught at CMS since 1996, is temporarily discontinued but is planned be relaunched in 2011 as Irish Family, Local and Migration Studies.

As one would expect, the focus of the Library’s collection, numbering some 16,000 volumes, reflects the main themes of the Folk Park so coverage includes emigration, housing, farming, education, shops, traditional crafts, biographies, social customs, settlement in frontier and urban America, Native American history and lifestyles. In addition to the books there is an extensive range of periodicals and maps as well as other documentary materials. For instance, the library has built up a file of family information contributed by users and visitors and open for anyone to add to and there are in-depth resources relating to families with a more direct connection to the Folk Park such as the Campbells, who came from the local area and whose ancestral home, Aghalane House, can be seen in the Folk Park.

The materials in the library can be consulted on a reference-only basis but the Centre is open to all and offers study, photocopying and printing facilities and public access computers. Opening hours are Monday to Friday 10.30am-4.45pm (excluding Public Holidays) but it is worth bearing in mind that the Folk Park itself, in common with other branches of National Museums of Northern Ireland, is now closed on Mondays.

The Irish Emigration Database is another important aspect of the CMS’s services. Since its establishment in 1988 it has grown to a resource containing over 33,000 digitised transcriptions of primary sources including emigrant letters, journals, diaries, shipping advertisements and passenger lists. Access to the database is available from the computers in the Centre and from all NI public libraries on request. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) will provide access from its new premises, due to open in 2011, in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. It will also be available on-line world-wide from spring 2011 through the Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project http://www.dippam.ac.uk.

The Centre for Migration Studies is managed by the Scotch-Irish Trust of Ulster through a sub-committee called CMS Management Committee. The Library is funded and administered by Libraries NI, the Northern Ireland Library Authority.

For more information on other special collections in Northern Ireland libraries visit Research and Special Collections Available Locally (RASCAL) at http://www.rascal.ie. If you are interested in consulting special collections in libraries or institutions of which you are not a member find out about access arrangements via the LISC Inspire scheme at
http://www.liscni.co.uk/inspire.

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