The concept of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) did not exist in April 1926 when the census was taken. Neither did the belief that so many people would still be alive 100 years later, a total of 1,200 alone in the State.
Given that those born in the 1920s were highly likely to emigrate, the true figure of those who appeared in the census and are still alive is likely to be greater than the 1,200 figure.
GDPR, the EU’s regulation of digital data, came into force in 2018, and it meant an unforeseen headache for those overseeing the release of the census. All 1,200 centenarians had to be contacted and asked for their data to be released in advance of the census being opened to the public on April 18th.
Firstly, the team in the National Archives of Ireland had to be made officers of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) as only the CSO could access the census data in advance.
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The task of contacting all 1,200 centenarians fell to the Department of Social Protection, the only State organisation that had the data.
Some did not want their details included in the release of the census so their names have been redacted, but others were happy to be included.
About 60 agreed to be centenarian ambassadors and each will receive a commemorative mug and a certificate.
“We couldn’t believe how many of them there were,” said National Archives director Orlaith McBride. “In many ways their lives reflect the evolution and the development of the modern Irish State.”
Curiously, of the 60 or so who came forward, about 10 were nuns, hardly a representative sample, but an interesting phenomenon.
“It’s a random figure, but I thought it was interesting there were so many nuns,” said McBride.
The phenomenon of longevity in nuns has long been observed and has even been the subject of academic papers. As far back as 2003 a longitudinal survey in the United States of 676 nuns from the School Sisters of Notre Dame noted that they lived significantly longer than the rest of the population.
Among the Irish centenarian ambassadors is Sr Miriam Twohig (102), born Eileen Twohig at Coolavokig, near Macroom, a member of the Sisters of Charity religious order who can remember hearing about the outbreak of the second World War.
“My father was listening to the radio and he came in to the kitchen and said: ‘Mother, the war is on, the war is on.’ I will never forget it,” she says.
The National Archives team began work on the census in August 2023. There are 2,496 books from all of the electoral divisions in the State at the time. The enumerators were 2,000 gardaí who were charged with collecting the information.
Once the information was collated, these beautiful hardback books were laced together and placed in boxes. Nearly a century later the laces that tied them together had to be broken so the restoration work could begin. Every page was surface cleaned and 70,000 of the pages went through conservation as they had a tear or they needed some kind of flattening out if there were creases.
It took eight people the equivalent of 1,526 days labour to go through the conservation of the material so that they could be scanned on both sides. The population of the State was just under three million and there were 562,000 household returns. This led to some 750,000 pages being scanned and uploaded on to the internet, a process which involved six full-time National Archives staff.
The Irish State has been a world leader in uploading its archives to the internet and making it available free of charge; that includes the 1901 and 1911 censuses. By contrast, in the UK, census records are not free to access. The 1921 UK census, which did not extend to Ireland because of the unrest in the country at the time, is behind a paywall.
A further 50 people within the National Archives of Ireland have been checking every single entry, all of which are handwritten. As would be expected, the legibility of the handwriting varied from person to person.
“What we want by April 18th, more or less, all of the names will be as correct as they can be. There will always be a margin of error,” said McBride.
The public could fill out the census in Irish or English. Previous UK censuses were in English only. “We thought we would see a huge amount of the returns in Irish, but it was only around 1 per cent. That was a surprise for us,” McBride observes.
This included people in the Gaeltacht who were illiterate but the enumerator filled out their forms in English.
One valuable piece of information in the census is that the public was asked who their employer was. “You are beginning to see what local economies looked liked and you got a sense of who the big employers were,” she said.
[ Here’s one thing to look forward to this year: the release of the 1926 censusOpens in new window ]
More than half (52 per cent) of people in rural areas were classified as farmers or living on a farm. The census included information on land holdings, vital information as far as the Free State government was concerned.
“Boarding houses were such a thing in 1926, particularly in Dublin. You can see how people from the country are moving to the city for work,” she said.
“They are interesting because you see who was on holidays in Ireland at the time, and you see commercial travellers in hotels, a vanished tribe once common around Ireland.”
The census includes a list of professions which are almost extinct such as lamplighter, umbrella fixer, knitters, hosiery makers and High Court crier.
The returns for Ardnacrusha show that some 700 men were involved in the construction of that hydroelectric project in Co Clare. Unsurprisingly, there is a significant number of Germans living in the area around Ardnacrusha.
Information relating to industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and prisons are also included in the census. Some of those who were incarcerated were named; others were identified by their initials.
The population of the State dropped by 5 per cent from 1911 to 1926 and, significantly, the Protestant population dropped by 32 per cent in the same period.
As electoral boundaries remained roughly the same pre- and post-independence, it ought to be possible to do comparative analysis in the same areas as to who left and stayed behind.
For the National Archives staff, the deadline was a hard one. There could be no sliding away from having all the material ready for April 18th. “It was really rewarding that we could mark our progress as we went along,” said senior conservator Jessica Baldwin.
“The key to success was adding to the team. We tracked how many days it took with each one and we were lucky that we could take on contract conservators because of the funding we were given.”
Many of the conservators came from overseas, including one from Brazil. “We had a great team spirit and we were all driven by wanting to provide the best access for the public. It was a real privilege to be the first people to see these census reports in nearly 100 years.”
Interest in the archives is likely to extend far beyond Ireland. A half a million Irish people emigrated in the 1950s, and many of them would have been recorded in the 1926 census. There are an estimated six million people in Britain with Irish ancestry and millions too in the other English-speaking countries the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
- The 1926 Census records are available at nationalarchives.ie
