Wednesday August 19 2009
BELLEWSTOWN Heritage Group is pulling out all the stops for this year's exhibition.
Coinciding with National Heritage Week at the end of August, the exhibition is entitled '150 Years of Bellewstown, its Fieldnames, Families and Dwellings' and records the family histories of all the houses in the village.
Almost 200 houses are given a mention, including ruins and long-gone houses, based on census material from the 1911 and 1901 returns as well as local history of the area. 'Our focus was largely on dwellings from the 1850s up to the 1970s,' said Grace McCullen, PRO of Bellewstown Heritage Group. 'But we've gone through each and every house in the locality and put a name to who's living there now and who's lived there through the ages. It will be very interesting for locals to discover who had been living in their homes in the early 1900s.'
Grace praises the hard work of John Kirwan, who spent the last year researching the information and she also gives credit to local octogenarian Seamus O'Neill for his contribution. 'Seamus is a well-known character in Bellewstown who had plenty of parochial stories to share with us,' she said. He provided background information on numerous residents which was great.'
In addition to the census-gathering side, the exhibition coordinates with the Meath Field Name Project which was set up last year with a view to recording the 100,000 fieldnames in Co. Meath.
Recent Geography graduate Colin Byrne, from Julian-stown, has mapped all of the fields in Bellewstown and locals will be able to identify where their homes are situated.The exhibition takes place on August 29th (6.30pm-9.30pm) and 30th (10.30am5.30pm) at Bellew-stown Parish Hall.
