The fire that destroyed the Public Records Office (PRO) during the Irish Civil War also destroyed 700 years worth of records.
Chancery records detailing British rule in Ireland going back to the 14th century and grants of land by the crown along with thousands of wills, title deeds and parish registers were incinerated when a fire broke out in the grounds of the Four Courts, which held the PRO, on June 30th, 1922.
By common consent the worst loss of all was the pre-Famine 19th-century census records. In an act of unparalleled archival vandalism the British authorities had destroyed the 1861 and 1871 census records so that they could not be used for the “gratification of curiosity”. The 1881 and 1891 censuses were pulped during the first World War because of the shortage of paper. The British saw the censuses as purely a numbers game, not a valuable archive for future research.
That left the pre-Famine censuses of 1821, 1831 and 1841 still intact, but these were almost entirely destroyed in the fire.
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The Virtual Treasury project was set up to try to recover as many of the lost documents as possible. Hundreds of thousands of documents have been retrieved where copies have been found in archives elsewhere, but the census records were always the priority.
Thanks to years of work on the part of Brian Gurrin, the treasury’s population and census specialist, some 60,000 names and counting have been recovered from 19th-century censuses.
Four volumes from the 1821 census survived the fire, including the entire records for the Aran Islands, and have been in the National Archives of Ireland since. The Aran Islands was entirely Irish-speaking at the time, but the names are all recorded in English.
They were available previously on microfilm, but that necessitated a visit to the National Archives.
“Brian’s detective work has given them a whole new lease of life,” said Zoë Reid, the keeper of manuscripts at the National Archives of Ireland.
They have now been digitised. Other copies have been found from diligent genealogists who would copy census records for research purposes.
“We talk about 60,000 names, but there are many, many more to go in. We haven’t finished the process,” said Mr Gurrin.
Virtual Record Treasury codirector Ciarán Wallace added: “When we go to county libraries as part of a roadshow, the first question is: ‘have you found the census yet?’. We have put a huge effort into finding anything we can of the censuses,” he said
All the census names have been looked at individually and entered by hand. No machine learning or AI was used.
All the census data has been consolidated in the population portal. Everywhere that a name or names have been recovered is denoted with a pin where users can zoom in to reveal the details.
The interest is not only within Ireland. Tens of millions of people, especially in the United States, are descended from 19th-century Irish emigrants. Half of all visitors to the virtual treasury come from abroad.
The census records are part of 175,000 new historical records that will be available from Monday, June 30th, the 103rd anniversary of the Public Records fire.
The project has been led by Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport and the National Archives of Ireland.
Also included in the release is the Age of Revolution portal which includes contemporary accounts from the Irish House of Commons about the American revolution and the 1798 rebellion, five million words of Anglo-Norman (1170-1500) Irish history translated into English and more than 10 million words on governing Ireland in the dramatic years following Cromwell’s death.
Virtual Record Treasury academic director Dr Peter Crooks described the recovery of 60,000 census names as a “tremendous achievement. What we have uncovered after years of painstaking archival work will help families across the world trace their story deeper into the Irish past.”
He added: “The scale, scope and significance of these materials is remarkable. They will be of huge interest to anyone exploring Ireland’s story as a global island.”
