Dardanelles: Online memory map of Enniskillen's 'Back Streets' area now live

The project was supported by the Lough Erne Landscape Partnership (LELP) through funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

This memory map was created to commemorate a lost part of Enniskillen’s heritage, its ‘Back Streets’, also known as the Dardanelles.

This free application contains different sections, including a history of Enniskillen with a focus on the ‘Streets’.

There are photos, maps and details of the 67 soldiers from the Streets who died in the period 1914-1921. It also details the conditions of the families and their houses, employment and industry of the area, as well as trade union activity.

Other areas include oral interviews from former residents of the ‘Streets’ on topics such as the Abbey Street School, children’s games, and The Great War.

More than 60 people attended the memory map launch event, with a number of others attending virtually via Zoom online meetings.

“There was somebody from Canada online,” said Mervyn Hall, Secretary of Fermanagh Genealogy Centre, adding that the group were very pleased with the turn-out.

Hazel Long from LELP, and Maeve Cadden, the new curator of the Inniskillings Museum, both spoke at the launch event.

“The major part of the project is really about the 67 men from the streets who perished in World War One.

“I worked with the [Inniskillings Museum] to get material on the military records of those men, and Maeve was saying that that was such a valuable resource to them as well, because I obviously was able to expand on all of that and do the genealogy of the soldiers,” said Mervyn, giving an example that nine pairs of brothers from the Back Streets were killed in the war.

“[The Inniskillings Museum] mightn’t have necessarily made all of those connections. It was quid pro quo,” he added, noting that Fermanagh Genealogy Centre and the Inniskillings Museum were able to share information through the research process for the memory map.

“I couldn’t have done that without the military information on the men, but then I was able to beef that up a bit about their families and the connections.”

Mervyn also noted the Fermanagh Genealogy Centre’s gratefulness to LELP for the funding support that made the project possible.

The memory map is now live and is viewable via https://fermanaghgenealogy.org/MemoryMap/backstreets.

If you have information or photographs related to the Back Streets – Dardanelles, you’re invited to get in touch with Fermanagh Genealogy Centre via its website.

“We’re going to keep the site live so that we can add more oral interviews and hopefully receive more photographs, and that type of thing,” Mervyn told this newspaper.