Our May meeting will be take place this Wednesday 10th May at 7:00 pm at Armagh County Club (33 Upper English Street), where member John Shephard will meet us and give us a short talk about the history of the club.

The building has been renovated as part of the Armagh City Townscape Heritage Scheme. This is a National Lottery Heritage Funded Regeneration Programme. £6.3m in funding has been secured for the Armagh City Townscape Scheme which consists of monies from ABC Council, £2m, National Lottery Heritage Fund, £1.92m and the remainder from private property owners.

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday 5th April  at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Rosie Hickey from the Strand Cinema Project .

She will be talking about local cinemas and her cinema project, which is now being extended across Northern Ireland.

Rosie has worked as Heritage Officer of the Strand Arts Centre since 2020. She manages the ‘Strand Stories’ project (Strand Stories (strandstoriesbelfast.com)) which is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. In this role she combines two of her interests: exploring the nooks and crannies of historic buildings and collecting memories of Belfast’s past.

Rosie graduated with an MA (Hons) in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh in 2010 and received a PhD in Architecture from Queen’s University Belfast in 2017. And since 2020 she has been a member of the Historic Buildings Council.

Our next monthly meeting will be take place on Wednesday 8th March in Armagh County Museum. We will start at the earlier time of 6:30pm with our Annual General Meeting, which will be followed by a talk starting at 7:30pm.

Our speaker this month is our Canadian member Sharon Oddie Brown. This year, Sharon will be speaking about Forkhill Jacksons: Kith and Kin.

Sharon will explore connections – with a dollop of humour and an unconventional approach to research – between various JACKSON families to the JACKSONs of Forkhill, including the alleged Armagh connections of Sir Thomas JACKSON (1839-1915) of Urker to Richard JACKSON of Forkhill.

Richard JACKSON of Forkhill had no children to inherit his estate, and the Forkhill Trust began thanks to bequests in his will. At the time, it took a fleet of lawyers to sort out various legal hurdles, but The Forkhill Trust continues to this day to support local charities.

Sir Thomas’ connection to the Forkhill JACKSON was claimed in 1912 when he donated money to the Forkhill Trust. The minutes of the Trust record: The Trustees thank Sir Thomas Jackson of Stansted house, Essex for helping build Creggan Schools. In his turn he thanked the Trustees for their contribution. He was a kinsman of the Founder, and was a banker in Hong Kong and had property at Urker, Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh.  

But was Sir Thomas a kinsman of Richard of Forkhill? Possibly. Were other JACKSONs of Co. Armagh also related? Probably. There are several twists and turns to this tale. Come and find out.

Our next monthly meeting will be taking place next week on Wednesday, 8th February at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library as usual.

Our speaker this month is Dr Laura Patrick, who is currently Regimental Heritage Officer and Director of the Virtual Military Gallery at the Regimental Headquarters of the Royal Irish Regiment in Holywood.

Her talk is entitled Investigating the Late Medieval Landscapes of Ulster: a Cartographic Study and is based on her study of the Bodley and Raven maps of 1608.

Our January meeting will take place on Wednesday, 11th January at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

This month sees the return of Dr Liam Campbell from the Centre for Migration Studies in Omagh.

His talk is entitled ‘Exploring the Migrant in everyone : Leaving, Crossing and Arriving’.