1926 Irish Free State census released by the National Archives of Ireland

The day has come - the 1926 Free State census for Ireland has finally been released after 100 years at https://nationalarchives.ie/collections/search-the-1926-census/. I have already made several searches in this today, uncovering various situations for my family and that of my wife, and it has been a pleasant search experience, with no site crashes, and an excellent presentation of the resources, which are free to view. This is one area where the Republic of Ireland really does trump the UK, in making its public documents available free of charge, as can also be witnessed through its birth, marriage and death records platform at https://www.irishgenealogy.ie. 

 

The equivalent census for Northern Ireland, taken on the same night, has sadly not survived, but something that I learned during the week is that even if it had done so, it may well have not been released. This is because, unlike the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland astonishingly does not have a 100 year census rule for privacy, thanks to an act of the Stormont parliament from 1969. The same fate awaits the 1937 Northern Irish census, which means that unless a specific law is passed for it to be released, it just won't be. If we want to see it, we'll have to start lobbying our politicians to get their acts together! You can read more about this in an interesting blog post from Professor Marie Coleman of Queen's University Belfast at https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/qpol/the-lost-northern-ireland-census-of-1926.

In the meantime, what details are included in the 1926 Free State census? You can find the answers to this at https://nationalarchives.ie/search-the-1926-census-2/census-1926/. It's not quite as detailed as the 1911 census, but it is nevertheless another very useful document for family history research.

Have fun exploring!

Chris 

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