Census 1911
Like many others I have engrossed in the National Archives and the 1911 census which is now online and searchable and is absolutely amazing. The all-Ireland data was recently released and I cannot imagine what work must have gone into digitising it all, but I can say that it was a fantastic job and I learned so much as did everyone I knew who did it.
The most fascinating and indeed poignant information I found involved my grandfather’s family entries.
Thats my grandad at the bottom of the form and under this is my grandad with me and my uncle (who incidentally was named after my Granda).
The information about my family contained in the census is fascinating, they spoke Irish and English, my great-grandfather was a French polisher, I never knew that, actually I knew little about them really. This has told me so much, who would have thought there would be so much information in such a small place. I’ve had friends find out their family didn’t actually come from where people thought. So if you are looking yourself you should bear that in mind, and you should also bear in mind that few of those in the census appear to have gone by their birth name. Some of them are easy to guess in that they are derivatives of their birth names, in other instances such as with some of my family members their names had nothing to do with their given names.
The picture below shows the family minus my Granda and this is where it raises questions for me as it has been presumed the children are as you see in the form, except for my Granda. However the more I thought about it the ages don’t marry. According to the information in the census, my great-grandparents had 10 children and maybe the little girl isn’t Anne (3) at all, but another child who died. There is a big-ish age gap between her and her older brothers which there doesn’t seem to be here. At first I thought this was taken just before my great-grandmother was about to get pregnant or indeed just pregnant with my Granda, judging by the age of who I thought was Anne, but given the ages of the other boys, its not possible. The little girl in the pic must have been one of their children who died. And thats not the only sad thing in these details.
At the far left of the picture is Robert Morgan. Robert signed up with the Royal Irish Fusiliers and died in the First World War. Like many others Robert must have lied about his age to sign up as on his gravestone his age is 26, but according to the census he would have only been 21 when he died in 1918. What is even more uncanny is that he is the double of my cousin who was named after him, a cousin who sadly passed away too young a couple of years back.
(My great-grandfather and great-grandmother – she looks a little scary, doesn’t she?)
The other family I definitely found was my maternal grandmother’s family and what is mad about this, is that the census was taken three days before she was born.
Elizabeth, known as Lily, was blind. My Nanny would tell me all sorts of stories about her and how she would check their faces to see if they were wearing make-up, and therefore going out, and make my Nanny bring her to Central Library to bring back her braille books. Or how she would check their wardrobes to feel if they had any new frocks. I loved hearing those stories. And I loved even more seeing her on the census.
I also checked my father’s side but was stumped with names, so I’m going to talk to family and find out more. But a mad coincidental thing did happen, I started to look via their street name, and ended up with three pages of the one street. My other Nanny was called Susan, but known as Vera, so I clicked on someone called Susan who lived on the street, even thought I don’t think she would have been born then (but I could be wrong) and I somehow in the first click, actually got their house. So even if it isn’t my family they lived in the house I spent so much time in as a child and they were all mill workers. What is mind-boggling is that there was a husband and wife, their child, an aunt and a lodger living in the two-up two-down terraced house.
We learn so much about our families from the census, and I am delighted the National Archives put so much work into releasing all this invaluable information. Thank you.
September 8th, 2009 at 12:46 am
I agree the census is fascinating, I hope they put other census returns online as well. We have started a family tree based on it.
You should go into the national archives on Bishop St and get the 1901 census for the household. I did that today and discovered a great aunt who was 1 month old in 1901 and had died before the 1911 census. I spent 3 hours scrolling through microfilm pages looking for family members and did not notice the time passing. The staff are very helpful and the service is free. I’ll be going back tomorrow to find some more census forms for my mothers side of the family.
September 8th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Oohh I will do that Declan, thanks for that.
September 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I also had a look on the site and found my maternal grandmother, four years old in County Kilkenny! Under occupation it was listed that she was a ‘scholar’! Aw! She had obviously just started school.
Am trying to find my Dad’s family too though we know little about them, so have to get some more facts about them off him and will then look them up. Can’t wait to show my Mam her family one though when I can next get her in front of the laptop, she’ll be delighted to see it, even to see her Granddad’s handwriting will be lovely for her. (I’m assuming
Well done National Archives!
Great post too, lovely to see all the old photographs!
September 8th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Sorry I clicked submit too early there! I meant I’m assuming it’s their own handwriting and not a census taker…though not sure how it would have been done back then!
September 8th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I think that most households filled them out themselves. I’ve spent two days going through the 1901 census forms for my family and then searching the records of near by houses for aunts and uncles and other relatives and the handwriting is generally different on each form. On a couple of forms there is two types of handwriting so possibly the enumerator filled in details that had been left out. If you are in doubt look for the enumerators sheets at the beginning of each section and he will have written down the names of every family in the area. You can compare that to the writing on a form to see if they match.
September 8th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
How neat! I’m going to check out my husbands family.
September 8th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
[...] miles apart, but the learned writing style is nearly the same throughout the country. Redmum has reproduced her ancestor’s census form and you can see the writing style there. I’m not reproducing mine. I’m keeping some [...]
September 9th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Wow simply amazing! I must check out the census
September 9th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
I also had great fun looking up the census and then querying older family members for background on my predecessors. Turns out my great great grandfather, Lawrence Barry, was a FIanna Fáil councillor at one stage in Cork (much to my chagrin
) and when he passed away his son James held the seat. According to my family, he fell out with the party after movement of the constituency boundary effected him negatively. It’s believed that he resigned his seat in protest. That was interesting to find out. If I hadn’t raised the question about him after seeing the census I’d never have known.
Sadly infant mortality seemed to feature quite a lot in the census forms I accessed. Both sides of my family recorded quite a lot more births than there was living children. Having pressed for information from family I discovered that at least one young child died of dyptheria. Nothing is known about the others. It also made me think, gosh, what will my descendants make of me? We won’t be leaving behind any grainy mystery as our lives are forever catalogued in cyberspace. Must think twice before I tweet!
September 10th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
You should check out the general Register Office in the Irish Life Centre on lower abbey Street.
http://www.groireland.ie/research.htm
It will hold an index of all births deaths and marriages for Northern Ireland from 1864 to 1921 & you can get copies of the originals.
September 15th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Thanks everyone for the comments, great to hear your stories too. I will check out the other sources, ie General Register office.
And Decs and Karen – sorry to disappoint about your families’ penmanship, I believe particular areas would have been written by the same person. And all school children were called scholars
(which is kinda cool).
September 24th, 2009 at 4:18 am
Having pored over years of U.S. census documents this past summer, I was struck immediately by the clarity of the original Irish census documents. American census data was written by ‘census takers’ who often had bad handwriting and made errors in transcribing the spoken data. Irish census data was written by heads of households themselves who seemed to make every effort to write in their best handwriting. It was a real surprise. Additionally, the viewing options for the Irish data are amazing. The whole site is something to be proud of and a great resource.