Previously undocumented names of children in mother and baby homes are now available as public record following the release of 1926 census records.
The publication of individual census returns, now searchable online for the first time, has animated the Ireland of 100 years ago, detailing ages, occupations, religions and genders of citizens of the newly established Irish Free State.
Among them are residents of the mother and baby homes in Tuam, Co Galway, and Bessborough, Co Cork, which had begun operating in the years prior to the census being taken.
On most of the census forms, the “marriage or orphanhood” section denotes a child’s relation to the head of the household, essentially clarifying whether their parents were alive in 1926. This was the first census to record the status of “orphanhood”.
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Accompanying the digital release of the records on Saturday, the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) launched its exhibition on the 1926 census in Dublin Castle. Featuring facsimiles of individual returns, it analyses Ireland under categories like religion, language, sport, culture, employment, migration and identity.
“It reflects back to us the Ireland that is within the census returns,” NAI director Orlaith McBride said.
The free exhibition is open at Dublin Castle 10am to 5pm daily until August 15th.
For the 120 children aged between eight months and six years in the Tuam mother and baby home (described in census forms as the “Tuam Children’s Home”), the word “illegitimate” was instead written in the column.
The findings offer an insight into the disparities in the recording of some of Ireland’s more vulnerable citizens in 1926. For instance, 1,735 people appear in the census as residents of Ballinasloe Lunatic Asylum, Co Galway, with their full names listed, while in Grangegorman Mental Hospital in Dublin, only the initials of the inmates are recorded.
Gardaí acted as enumerators for the census, recording data around the country and occasionally making adjustments to documents as they saw fit. There were instances of gardaí crossing out a household member listed as a daughter, for example, and reclassifying them as a granddaughter based on their own local knowledge.
Anyone looking to investigate the census records is advised to gather as much information as they can before using the database, as their search will benefit from specific inputs. This is the case for the mother and baby homes too, which can only be found through the correct town lands in their respective counties.
Records relating to famous figures can also be found, including Éamon de Valera in the year he established Fianna Fáil, fellow republican Constance Markievicz and poet William Butler Yeats.
Samuel Beckett is recorded as Sam A Barclay Beckett - the– a 20-year-old medical student in Foxrock, Co Dublin. A three-year-old Brendan Behan is recorded as a resident of Russell Street in Dublin’s north inner-city 32 years prior to the publication of Borstal Boy.
Many of the recorded trades and occupations are no longer in existence. For those within the NAI, there was a fascination with the biscuit and biscuit-wrapper makers at the old Jacob’s factory on Bishop Street in Dublin, where the repository for state records is now based.
“We have umbrella fixers,” McBride said. “We have a crier to the high court; we have weavers and hand knitters along the west coast, really speaking to a very different time [before] that more industrialised machinery that was introduced. We have rabbit trappers.”
Over half of Irish workers at the time were employed in agriculture, with 14 per cent working in manufacturing and 7 per cent recorded as domestic servants. Class dynamics revealed widespread inequality across large parts of the country, with those in the west and the south experiencing the worst living conditions.
Today, there are just over 1,000 centenarians in Ireland that lived through the census of 1926. Four of them were present at the launch on Saturday, with a video featuring each of them played before the Taoiseach Micheál Martin, and Minister for Culture, Communications Patrick O’Donovan, at Dublin Castle.
