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.

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