By Eilisha Devlin
TODAY the first Census of the Irish Free State was published online for the anticipating public.
This Census will include 26 counties instead of 32 as it is the first recorded Census following the establishment of Ireland as an independent nation. It is also the first Census release in more than fifty years.
Genealogist Ann Carroll in Manorcunningham says, “I’ll be waiting until Sunday to look it up online because I fully expect the website to crash with the amount of people interested and logging on to see.”
The Central Statistics Office stated that unlike the earlier censuses conducted under British administration, the census 1926 was undertaken by institutions of the new State. Considering that most of the four censuses taken from 1821 to 1851 were destroyed in an explosion at the Public Records Office in Dublin, it is the first major release since the 1901 and 1911 censuses.
Taken one hundred years ago, this year’s census release will fill the gap between the 1911 census and includes a collection of over 700,000 household records. The population at the recording of the census was 2,971,992, which was already showing a 5.3 per cent decrease from 1911.
The details collected for the 1926 census include for each person and household, their name, age, sex, marital status, birthplace, religion, occupation and their ability to speak Irish.
This census is so important to historians and the general population due to the historical context it will provide. Ireland had just overcome the first world war, the 1916 rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, so it will provide a major insight into how Ireland was organising and evaluating its newly established society in its formative years.
This census will also include many famous Irish figures that are and were influential today, such as Countess Constance Markiewicz, WB and Jack B Yeats and every Irish president up to and including Patrick Hillery. It will have a generation of parents and grandparents for families to look at online in search of their Irish ancestry.
The next Census will not be released until 1937, another eleven years to wait. It is not just a documentation of names and numbers, it offers a vivid image of Irish society emerging from a war torn country in light of a new found independence and self-governance.
It will be released for free online at the National Archives of Ireland.