PRONI launches coronavirus census for posterity

This is such a brilliant idea, an Irish census story with (hopefully) a happy ending!

As part of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland's Stay Home Memories project initiative, launched on March 23rd 2020, the archive is now asking people to fill out a census form to describe the experience, for the use of future generations looking back at the coronavirus crisis of 2020. Here is the full project update:

Stay Home Memories project

As the Official Archive for Northern Ireland, PRONI will receive and archive records of the activities of the nine core Civil Service departments and how they responded to the pandemic. It is also important that PRONI is able to collect, preserve and make available the experiences of as many members of our community as possible, and for this we need your help.

PRONI has launched the Stay Home Memories project to gather information on the lives of the people of Northern Ireland and how the pandemic effected everything from work and education to shopping and family and social life.

Record keeping is vital to our understanding of the past, and the present. In recent years PRONI has been able to investigate and understand events around the Decade of Centenaries because of the historical records that were kept and it’s important that we collect information now for researchers of the future.

There are three ways that you can participate in the Stay Home Memories project:

Stay Home Census
Complete the Stay Home Census Form and tell us who you locked down with, how it affected your work, education and living arrangements.

Stay Home Web Archive
PRONI already archives government and local authority websites but so much key information is held on private and community based websites. Help to capture our online heritage by nominating websites containing information on community activity and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stay Home Diaries
Diaries can tell us so much about an individual’s experience of a historical time period – have you been keeping one during the COVID-19 pandemic? If so, would you consider depositing it with PRONI? We can accept both paper and digital diaries, as gifts or loans and you can decide who gets access to it and when.


The Stay Home Census form is accessible at https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/publications/stay-home-census. Once filled in, you are asked to return your completed census to pronievents@communities-ni.gov.uk or by post to STAY HOME MEMORIES – PRONI – 2 Titanic Boulevard, Titanic Quarter, Belfast, BT3 9HQ.

And finally:

"By returning this census you are gifting it as a record to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. All census returns will be archived in the Stay Home Census archive at PRONI, held under reference D4771. In line with data protection legislation, the census returns will be closed to the public to protect personal information relating to living individuals. Any data used publicly will be anonymised."

This a Northern Ireland focussed project, but what a great idea for all of us around the world.

Great work, PRONI.

Chris

My next 5 week Scottish Research Online course starts June 8th - see www.pharostutors.com/details.php?coursenumber=102. My next book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 is out shortly, also available are Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.