The complete Census of Ireland in 1901 has been put online, making more than 4.5 million records available to genealogists, historians, and anyone who want to look into their family history. Some countries charge for access to such records, but this is a non-commercial, government service, and is free to use.
The census was taken on the night of Sunday, 31 March, 1901, and some 850,000 households on the island were covered. The Irish Minister for Culture Mary Hanafin said the launch of the service was "an important and exciting day for people all over the world who want to trace their roots."
Your ancestor's signature
Among English-speaking census-taking countries, Ireland is unusual in having the original forms filled out and signed by the head of each household on census night. Most other countries have just the books of enumerators - the family details transcribed by the person charged with collecting the census information.
That means that you can view a scanned version of the original form that was filled out for an individual household - including the actual signature of your ancestor.
For each person in the household, the 1901 Census forms show: the first name; surname; relation to head of family; religious profession; education; age; sex; occupation; marriage status; where born; if the individual spoke English, Irish or both, and if the person had a disability.
You can see all the information on the return displayed at the click of a mouse. Click again, and you'll get a pdf of the actual census form. The returns also give details of houses, such as the number of windows, type of roof and number of rooms.
Extra information
The website also provides historical background, photographs and digitized documents from the period, plus links to scholarly and genealogical sites.
It cost almost $5 million to digitize the records. The painstaking work was carried out by Ireland's National Archives in partnership with Library and Archives Canada over the past five years.
The 1911 census records went online between 2007 and 2009 and have attracted more than 260 million hits. Even though the service has not been launched formally in the US, 7 million individual users have used it.
During the Civil War, later census records were lost in a fire at the Public Records Office in 1922. Because of a shortage of paper during the First World War, some later records were pulped.
To get access to the Census, just go to: census.nationalarchives.ie
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