Lorraine Bourke and Grace Gordon, from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), will discuss one of PRONI’s key LGBTQ+ archives ‘The Cara-Friend Papers’. Cara-Friend has been supporting the LGBTQ+ community in Northern Ireland for over 50 years. This presentation will focus on letters sent to Cara-Friend in the 1970s and 1980s from people seeking advice, support and friendship. Lorraine and Grace will highlight how engagement with Belfast’s LGBTQ+ community helped their efforts to widen access to this important archive.
Lorraine Bourke has worked as Head of Private Records at PRONI for over 12 years. Lorraine leads a team responsible for appraising, cataloguing and encouraging access to a diverse range of privately deposited collections.
Grace Gordon is a graduate of the MA in Public History at Queen’s University Belfast and has been working at PRONI for the past 5 years. She has worked previously as a member of the PRONI’s Private Records team but now works in the archive’s Public Services section, managing PRONI’s communications, marketing and engagement output. In 2023, Grace managed the CollabArchive project at PRONI in partnership with Nerve Centre, a creative and digital media organisation.
