Fermanagh Genealogy Centre has recently launched an exciting new community project about the Back Streets of Enniskillen, also once known as the ‘Dardanelles’.

Supported by the Lough Erne, Landscape Partnership (LELP) and Heritage Lottery Fund, the project’s launch event took the form of a public meeting at Fermanagh House, Enniskillen and was also broadcast online via Zoom on Saturday, October 16.

Explaining the history of the Back Streets of Enniskillen, and the aims of the project, Mervyn Hall, Secretary of the Fermanagh Genealogy Centre said: “In 1970 the area between the library and Queen Street and where the road is at the river, Head Street, all that area was demolished and the people there were moved to the new estates at Kilmacormick and Hillview and so an area that at one time had over 1,000 people, just disappeared.

“We wanted to try and record the history of that, and literally record it because we hope to interview people that are now probably in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and try to capture what life was like because it was a tough area to live. It would have had some of poorest conditions in Enniskillen,” he said.

Mervyn’s attention was drawn to the history of the Back Streets when he first started volunteering with the Inniskillings Museum.

“The curator there, Neil Armstrong, had asked me would I do research on a walking tour around the town with a military focus. When I was doing that research I noted a photograph of the Back Streets/Dardanelles with red dots on the houses and I enquired what that was. Neil said that the late John Deering had put the red dots which identified young men from the streets who were killed in World War I.

“I then did further research and I’ve come across 64 men in that small area of Enniskillen that were killed in WWI or who died as a result of disease at that time,” he said, going on to explain that the Back Streets were known to the older generation as the Dardanelles because a lot of soldiers from that area who died in WWI were killed in 1915 in the Dardanelles, a strait in Turkey.

Mervyn highlighted his research to other members of Fermanagh Genealogy and a number showed an interest, including Chairman Frankie Roofe who actually grew up in the Back Streets of Enniskillen.

“We put our heads together and thought, ‘why don’t we do a project?’. We contacted LELP and asked them if they would be interested in giving us some funding for this and they were very keen,” said Mervyn, adding: “So we have a year to produce a memory map, it’s an online site which is free and it gives people all around the world an opportunity to access the Dardanelles.”

During the launch on Saturday, Fermanagh Genealogy showed some archive film of the Back Streets.

“The BBC gave us permission. It was a piece of archive film from 1960. It would make you cry, the conditions were shocking. We showed that and Frankie Roofe, he knew some of the wee kids, he would’ve been a kid at that time too. It had a very powerful impact on the audience and there was actually a member of the audience who was one of the wee boys in that film,” noted Mervyn.

Following on from the launch, a second session is to take place at Saturday, November 27 at 2pm, where members of the public are invited to bring along photographs and memorabilia related to the Back Streets.

“The beauty of this is we don’t know what people will bring. If we get photographs or war medals, dockets of old shops, then we can photograph them and put them on this memory map and then we can take the names of the people we would like to interview,” Mervyn told this newspaper.