Belfast and our first visit to the PRONI

we arrived in Belfast on Monday and went to our Bed and Breakfast and rested and studied up on all of the things we needed to research. We are staying about a mile from the PRONI which is the research or records office of Northern Ireland. We walked there this morning, Tuesday, and started to look up the lists submitted to us by Rob Hull our DNA cousin and Cynthia, our cousin from Australia and a few of my own. Linda started out finding the 23 page article called "The Benson's of Donegal" that Uncle Bob found back in the 70's and tried to hand copy because they wouldn't allow copying then. This time we were allowed copies and I just got through reading the paper and it has a lot of information about the Bensons and one is that Peter Benson the builder comes from Northern England near a place we are going for three days on our trip. Linda, my wife, requested that we go to the site of her Morrison line which is in Sunderland, England. Peter Benson's family live a short distance and Debbie Parker's family, wife of our famous web host, Robert Parker, family lives in Sunderland also so we have a bunch of research ahead. Today we also got the deed to the Hillfoot farm when it was first puchased from the Skinner Company by Robert Hull Robert is the brother of Thomas Hull 2nd and he married a Margaret Douglas. The Hull family, Thoma Hull 1st, leased the land and farm from about the early 1800's to the purchase. We will be visiting several relations from the Douglas family on our trip both in Dungiven and in Scotland. The deed shows we bought the farm from the skinners in 1887 for about £450.00 pounds. We paid about 10% down and then agreed to pay over time and a second deed is recorded that says that the debt was to beforgiven because of the family being indentured or something like that. All of the properties around our farm were purchased by their tenets about the same time and all were forgiven the debt about the same time. We also got a copy of the map of the landowners of our farm in Ballymackeever and Tirgoland the one next door and a map of all of the townlands held by the skinners. These are only available here in the PRONI. We will continue to pursue the research tomorrow and Thursday morning. This evening we went walking to get some food and to get an adapter for the 240 power they have here and we walked by a Presbyterian Church and guess who is the Priest a Reverand Hull. So tomorrow at 8 p.m. we are crahing their meeting to see if we can get his genealogy and do a DNA test on him. I am sure he will think we are crazy but if I have to I will tackle him and have Linda do the swabbing before he can protest. Across the street from where we are staying is another Presbyterian Church and it turns out that this parish has a copy of all of the Northern Ireland parish records. They are just housed a couple of miles from here so we will make an appointment and go there. I can definetly feel Mary Benson and the family helping us and if I don't get put in jail for illegal swabbing we should do really well with all of our leads. I will include some pictures tomorrow but not much to see so far.