Speaking at a celebration event yesterday, Colum Boyle, permanent secretary of the Department for Communities, said the 100 key records have been carefully collated to showcase Northern Ireland’s “historical, social and cultural” history.

Selected records include:

• the oldest document currently held by PRONI — a Papal Bull by Pope Honorious III dating back to 1219;
• alonely-hearts letter written to the Mayor of Belfast in 1935 from a Seattle man seeking a “colleen” for “matrimony…..knowing full well that the very best of people in the world come from the North of Ireland”;
• notebooks and letters related to accounts of the Battle of the Boyne and the Easter Rising;
• Glens of Antrim song written in Irish from 1810 and a copy of Danny Boy Manuscript (1870 – 1914);
• correspondence from Wolfe Tone (1798);
• copy of Amy Carmichael’s Bible (1906); and
• court cases including that of Sarah McAllister from Cushendall who was accused in 1892 of murdering a four-year-old child and making other children sick with sweets and sugar coated with arsenic.

The unveiling of PRONI’s 100 treasures will continue as a rolling programme across social media channels during the year.

Mr Boyle said: “It is all too easy to think of archives as dusty inaccessible records languishing on shelves in darkened storerooms, but the work of PRONI clearly demonstrates the relevance and impact of archives in our society.”