The earliest surviving complete Census of Ireland has gone online, giving free access to over 4.5 million records from 1901 for historians, genealogists and anyone curious about their family history.
Some 850,000 households on the entire island were covered in the 1901 Census, which is now available to people all over the world.
Launching the website containing the Census today, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport Mary Hanafin described it as “an important and exciting day for people all over the world who want to trace their roots”.
“In a world which is very troubled, people want to know where they are rooted and are anxious to know about their background and their heritage,” she said.
The latest records to go online are expected to rival the popularity of the 1911 Census records, which were put on the web between 2007 and 2009 and have since attracted over 250 million hits and seven million unique users.
The Census taken on the night of Sunday, March 31st, 1901, can be accessed at census.nationalarchives.ie.
Unfortunately, there are no further complete sets of records to make available, as most of the Census records from the 19th century have been destroyed. Those from the early part of the century were lost in a fire at the Public Records Office during the Civil War in 1922, while some later records were pulped because of a paper shortage during the first World War.
The 1901 Census returns provide information about a household on a single sheet, covering the following categories – first name, surname, relation to head of family, religious profession, education, age, sex, occupation, marriage status, where born, where the individual spoke English or Irish or both and if the person had a disability.
Digitisation of the records has cost almost €4 million and the work has been carried out by the National Archives in a research partnership with Library and Archives Canada over the past five years.
Ms Hanafin said the project brought history “a bit closer to us all” in searching for our ancestors. The 1901 Census shows her own great-great-grandparents, Patrick and Jane Hanafin, were clothes dealers living with their children and grandchild in Longford.
“That’s where my interest in clothes came from,” she surmised.
She undertook to do everything possible in the coming months to enhance the storage facilities available to the National Archives.