Why take censuses in Ireland?

Ireland became part of the United Kingdom after the Act of Union in 1800. Before then, public administration in Ireland was quite unsystematic. After 1800, London found itself in charge of a place about which it realised it knew very little. The early decades of the nineteenth century therefore saw a sustained effort to measure and record Ireland in a way that had never happened before.

The first true census in the new United Kingdom was taken in Ireland in 1821. Earlier headcounts had taken place in England and Wales, but this was the first census that we would recognise as modern, listing names and family relationships, occupations and addresses. It was certainly flawed - the enumerators were paid by the number of returns they produced, a serious incentive to invent - but it was complete for the entire island.

Censuses were then held every ten years, becoming more detailed and comprehensive as Victorian public administration grew in competence and reached into every corner of Ireland.

What happened to the Irish census returns?

By 1914, ten full censuses had been carried out in Ireland. The returns from 1861 and 1871 were destroyed shortly after they were taken, but there were still no fewer than eight full sets of returns in existence, the earliest four transferred to the Public Record Office, the others still held by the Office of the Registrar-General, the body responsible for census-taking after 1851.

Then things started to go wrong. First, at some point during the first World War, the Registrar-General ordered the 1881 and 1891 returns to be pulped, for reasons that are still unclear.

And then in June 1922, in the bombardment that began the Civil War, the Public Record Office in Dublin was destroyed and every single item held in its Strong Room, including almost all of the four earliest censuses, was obliterated without trace.

The only two censuses to survive in their entirety were from 1901 and 1911. Scraps from the earlier censuses that were not in the Strong Room - out for rebinding, in use in the Reading Room, not yet returned to their shelves - were also spared.

All of the surviving pre-1922 returns are now imaged and freely searchable at the National Archives of Ireland website, census.nationalarchives.ie

How surnames began

In Europe, the adoption of hereditary surnames began in the Middle Ages, over the period between about 900 and about 1300 and continued at very different paces in different locations. In Wales, up to the mid 1800s, most people in rural areas used single-generation patronymics, as in Iceland. In Turkey, people were required to use a surname only from 1934.

Initially, surnames were common only among the aristocracy. With literacy and the broadening of government record-keeping, the practice slowly spread among other classes. In urban areas, at least, most surnames were fixed and hereditary by the 1700s.

Into the middle of this in the mid 1100s came the Normans, who as yet had no hereditary surnames themselves. They took up the Irish practice with relish. The De Burgo family, who acquired most of Connacht for themselves, spun off dozens of modern names: (Mc)Davey, (Mc)Davitt, (Mc)Doak, (Mc)Nicholas (Mc)Philbin, McRedmond . all stemming from the forenames of prominent de Burgos, and all following precisely the Gaelic Irish tradition.

When the system started in Ireland and how it worked

In Ireland the registration of non-Roman Catholic marriages began in 1845, but the full registration system only came into operation in 1864. From then on, in theory at least, there was a legal obligation, enforced by fines, to register all births deaths and marriage with a local registrar within a short period after the event.

What information is collected

From 1864 to 2004, the same items of information were recorded for each of the three events.

Births:

• Name, sex, date and place of birth;
• Name, surname, occupation and address of the father;
• Name, 'maiden surname' and address of the mother.

There was no legal obligation to register a first name, though the vast majority did.

Deaths:

• Full name, occupation, date, place and cause of death of the deceased;
• Age at death of the deceased;
• Person registering the death and their 'qualification' (for example, 'present at death').

There was no obligation to register any family relationships, but the person registering the birth was very often related, and specified the relationship ('wife' or 'daughter', for example).

Marriages: For each of the individuals marrying:

• Full names, ages, marital status, occupations, addresses at the time of the marriage, fathers' names and fathers' occupations; of the three events, the most useful for genealogy is a marriage record, since it records the fathers' names on both sides.

Poor Law Unions and Registration Districts

The geographical areas used to collect civil registrations were (and still are) based on the old Poor Law Unions. Each Union was a district with a workhouse at its centre, usually situated in a large market town. From 1838 on, these workhouses were responsible for providing the barest of minimal support to the most destitute in their Union.

When the registration system started in 1864, it used the already-existing framework of the Poor Law Unions to subdivide Ireland into Superintendent Registrar's Districts, identical to the Unions. Each SRD was headed by a Superintendent Registrar and subdivided in turn into a number of local districts, run by a registrar who was answerable to the Superintendent.

The local registrars collected birth, marriage and death registrations in pre-printed volumes, just adding each event chronologically as it was registered. When a volume was full, they passed it to the Superintendent. He then had a copy made, sent that copy to his head office, the General Register Office in Dublin, and held on to the local registrar's copy.

Catholic and Anglican dioceses and parishes

When the Reformation was introduced into Ireland in the sixteenth century, the parish structures of the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church of Ireland began to diverge. The Church of Ireland became the state Church, retained the old, medieval parishes and became in effect an arm of government.

The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, was weakened by the confiscation of its assets and the restrictions on its clergy, and so had to create larger and less convenient parishes. Eventually, this weakness allowed more flexibility. Catholic parishes could respond to new population centres and, in the nineteenth century, could adapt to reflect population change, splitting or shrinking as the size of its flock dictated.

What are they?

They consist of two very different sets of records, the Tithe Applotment Books (1823 to 1838), and Griffith's Valuation (1847 to 1864); both designed for tax collection.

What was recorded and when

The Tithe Books are the result of an attempt to survey agricultural property parish by parish across Ireland in order to assess the tax ('tithe') payable on agricultural produce to local Church of Ireland clergy. Because the Church of Ireland was the state church, everyone was liable to pay the tithe, not just Church members. This caused much controversy, with many people refusing to pay. and leading to a 'Tithe War' in the late 1820s and 1830s, mainly in Munster and south Leinster.