1911 Census
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009If you haven’t heard about this by now well you should have. It’s the online searchable version of the 1911 census.
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/
Over a year ago they started by putting online the census records for Dublin and just recently they finished all 32 counties so there’s a full record for you to find your grandparents or greatgrandparents and learn a bit more about them. Apart from names, dates, ages and locations, it gives you careers, religion, language, education, physical and mental defects and relationships between house dwellers.
And apart from your family, there are a whole load of famous people there too. If you spend a short while dipping in and out of different census sheets you get a great insight into what life was like back then. Look up a random name and you might find a labourer, a sailor on a docked ship, a Lord of the manor, a hotel visitor, or a sick child in hospital.
Not only is this an excellent genealogical resource, and a flutter of excitement for history buffs like myself, it’s also a great tool for stats & search games. So to start you off I give you the following challenges:
a) type in your own name and see how many of ‘you’ there were in 1911.
b) find Eamonn de Valera.
c) in the tradition of googlewhack, try and find a Christian name that matches only 1 person in the country in 1911 (there are some).
d) find a Russian, German and Spanish person.
e) find the oldest person in the country.
f) find the person who was living in your house or near where your house now is, back then.
g) find a famous pub or hotel that still exists today.
And hopefully along the way you’ll come across lots of stories and find the records as fascinating as I do.
Bar of chocolate to the best response.
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I found this a few months back and was able to find info on the people who lived in my cottage in 1911.Very very cool!
Cool site. I checked some of the family names in Sligo, found a lot of Gildea’s but only three male O’Rourke’s. Will have to dig out the family tree and do a more specific search another time. Thanks !
what?? there was only one Michelle in the country in 1911…madness…there are bajillions of us now
Found my great granparents on my mams side and my granparents on my dads side! My Grandad was only 4!
Area’s are spelled differently though so its hard to find places!
Cant wait to show this to my gran though!
There were no Ciara’s in 1911!
No Niamh Smiths at the time! Loads of us now though I think I am one of the older ones. Lots popping up on Bebo and Facebook these days.
You know yourself that I found my grandfather aged 3 listed as a female thanks to his father filling his age in on the wrong column
Was able to find my mother’s mother’s family in the ancestral homes. Finding my other grandparents families is proving to be tricky as there are so many Murphys in Wexford.
Green – sounds great, I hope there was a good story in there.
Seamus – that’s the thing, you need to know some family names & a street to make sure you’ve the right one.
Michelle – congratulations on the first censuswhack. What you’ll also find that some names were mad popular back then that you’d never see now, more old Englishy names. Check out Prudence.
Efa – I found that too.
Ciara – what you’ll find is that Irish names were spelt very different back then, what we know spell os Turlough was spelt Toirdhealbhch. Also, the search is fada-specific. That said I couldn’t find any variations of Ciara either.
Niamh – that was a funny one.
Niall – I’m 1/4 Murphy but they were in a tiny town so not too hard to find.
That’s briliant, I found my maternal grandmother aged 2 years old, and I think my paternal great grandmother and her brothers and her mother too. It’s amazing to find out stuff like that. Thanks so much for the link.
More stats for you:
There were 2,178,086 men and 2,185,367 men.
480k people lived in Dublin, with 477k in Antrim, 392k in Cork and 305k in Down.
Dorothy – no problem.
It took me a while to find my MULLAN gr-grandparents; in the end I just viewed all the households for their townland – Drumaduff, Co. Derry – and they’d been indexed as MULLENs. On inspecting the scanned return, it actually looks like my great-grandfather signed his name MULLIN. Unexpected as in documented records of the family before and since the MULLAN variant was used.
Beware the spelling variants. The way they have inconsistently indexed Mc surnames can catch you out also – sometimes with a space and sometimes without.
As has already been pointed out the returns are littered with inaccuracies because people make mistakes, may be economical with the truth or were having a laugh. Ages can be way out – my great-grandmother in Drumaduff was born in Co. Tyrone, but is listed as Co. Derry like the rest of the family.
Turns out there were no Brogen Hayeses in Ireland in 1911. Somehow I am not surprised. I *am* a thoroughly modern Millie… lol.
Bless the Doyles of 26 Darley St, Rathmines. The only 1911 family in Ireland with a child named for Wolf Tone; their 2nd son was named for Parnell.