HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. Reach me from contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

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More than 700,000 digitized pages of 1926 Irish Free State census return sheets have been released by the National Archives of Ireland. The sheets show names and individualized details such as religion, education, and occupation. They are a gold mine for historians and genealogists.

I located my relations in less than a minute. Begin your search here.

January 1926 US newspaper headline over Hearst story about census on both sides of the Irish border.

The 1926 census was the first headcount in Ireland since 1911. The 15-year stretch included the First World War (1914-1918), Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and Irish Civil War (1922-1923).

“Matters were too disturbed in the country from one end to the other in 1921–the date of the last British census–for such an operation to be possible at all in Ireland,” Hearst’s International News Service explained to American newspaper readers in a January 1926 story. The return of the census signaled “another hopeful sign of the better relations between the long divided sections of Ireland, growing out of the amicable settlement of the boundary dispute, that they can agree to take their censuses on the same day, that is engage in the peaceful pursuit of counting heads instead of breaking them.”^[1]”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Many in Ireland, then and now, would dispute whether the December 1925 settlement of the Irish Boundary Commission was “amicable.” It certainly ended the revolutionary period that disrupted the 1921 census, making the 1926 survey the first after partition of the island. The two governments made their separate counts on the same day.

The 26-county Free State census recorded a population of 2,971,992, a 5.3 percent decrease from the 1911 census. The population in the six counties of Northern Ireland increased by 0.5 percent to 1,256,561 during the 15-year period.

While statistical reports of the 1926 census in the North are available, the return sheets with the names and characteristics of individuals are believed to have been pulped or burned during the Second World War.^[2]”Census lost: Historic NI records may be destroyed“, BBC, June 11, 2013. This will hamper analysis of one of the key questions about the period: how Catholics and Protestants geographically redistributed immediately after partition; Catholics in the North moving to the Free State, Protestants in the Free State moving to the North.

The Burns Library at Boston College will host a traveling exhibit, “The Story of Us: Independent Ireland and the 1926 Census,” from May 13 through September 6. Hours and other booking details are still being confirmed.

Below is a short video about the 1926 census. Explore the digitized files of Ireland’s 1901 and 1911census records. (This post was revised from my Jan. 1, census release preview.)