Monthly Archives: June 2019

THE tourism industry in Northern Ireland is set to get a boost as 15 White Badge accredited tour guides graduated at Clifton House for the Belfast Charitable Society on Wednesday 26th June, 2019. The Belfast Charitable Society has been named as the first heritage site in Northern Ireland to receive this prestigious qualification and enables them to offer a culturally rich and informative experience for those visiting Belfast’s oldest public building, Clifton House. This has been made possible through the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Clifton House is now on a parallel to Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral and [...]

June 25th is 'Day of the Seafarer' and we thought it was appropriate to look at some of our connections to those who made their livelihoods on the open sea. Belfast in the 18th and 19th centuries was a thriving port. Ships docked from across the globe bringing everything from rum and sugar, to wool and exotic woods. Some of those foreign sailors who docked at Belfast would never return to their ships. Within the Belfast Charitable Society Archive, the burial registers shine a light on those sailors from foreign lands, who today rest in the shadow of the Poor House. [...]

BELFAST Charitable Society at Clifton House recently played host to Days for Girls (DfG), an international enterprise set up to remove barriers to education in the developing world. Education and feminine hygiene are two things taken for granted in the developed world, but in countries like South Sudan and Kenya, thousands of young girls are missing days of education each month as well as suffering isolation, indignity, shame, infection and even put at risk of exploitation due to the lack of understanding and access to affordable, dependable feminine hygiene during their menses. Diane Graham, NI Chapter Lead explains, “Missing long periods of [...]

Today staff at Clifton House had the pleasure of assisting Barbara Reagan from Perth, Australia,to locate her 3x Great Grandparent's final resting place in Clifton Street Cemetery. Barbara is attending the Ulster Historical Foundation's Family History Conference and we were contacted to see if we could find her family grave by one of their researchers. Our Archive & Heritage Development Officer was able to find the burials and grave reference in the Belfast Charitable Society archive. And here is what we were able to uncover about the Williams family. Samuel Williams was a comb-maker in Smithfield at the time of his death from [...]

Volunteers Week (1st-7th June) is a chance to celebrate and say thank you for the fantastic contribution millions of volunteers make across the UK. This year Belfast Charitable Society and Clifton House would like to celebrate their long standing volunteers, as well as our more recent cohort of White Badge Tour Guide Volunteers. Our volunteers undertake a number of different activities from researching and designing new tour offerings to delivering talks and tours. Beginning in January 2019, Belfast Charitable Society in association with the Institute for Tourist Guiding, and financial support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, have just completed Northern Ireland's first White [...]