Release of 1926 census files Brings history closer to home
History Matters, by Dr Paul Hughes
At the end of May 1926, three men appeared before Mullingar District Court charged, under Victorian-era gambling laws, with ‘permitting’ an illegal game of house in the upper rooms of the Railway Club at Dominick Place.
The three, along with 41 others later charged with ‘aiding and abetting’, were arrested on April 18, 1926 – a dramatic development on a night where families in Mullingar and beyond were otherwise concerned with the humdrum activity of filling in a return for the first census of the Irish Free State.
The principal defendants were, as you might guess from the location of the card game, railway employees. To be more precise, they worked for what was at the time the Great Southern Railway. One of them, 40 years old and a native of Multyfarnham, was the secretary of the Railway Club – the social venue for railway employees – and worked as a permanent way inspector with the GSR. His wife was a native of Johnstownbridge, Co Kildare, and they had an eight-year-old son. They had been married for 14 years and nine months.
Despite the events of later that night, when he and 43 others were marched to the nearby courthouse after the raid by the Civic Guard, the gentleman in question had fulfilled his duty of being at home for the census. With him and his immediate family in the house that night were his niece, a tailor’s assistant who was out of work for two years, and his brother-in-law, a coal labourer with the GSR who, presumably, was among the 44 arrested when the two later went to the Railway Club .
How do we know such intimate detail? Contemporary newspapers and court records tell us names, the particulars of the Railway Club raid and the subsequent court case but, for the vast majority of above information, the recently released 1926 census returns are our source.
In this instance, because the story centres on a court prosecution, however picayune, I have omitted names. As many people who have so far perused the National Archives 1926 census returns will know, unlike its 1901 and 1911 antecedents, the 1926 census hits closer to home. Some of us, depending on our age, will recognise parents, grandparents, (grand)uncles and (grand)aunts who we knew in the flesh, either from childhood memories or vivid adulthood recollections. Historian Diarmaid Ferriter has described the repository as a “web of wonder” that is “full of puzzles”, even about his own family history.
The 1926 census returns form a massive dataset that will greater enable us to assess how Ireland changed after 15 years of world war, revolution, civil war and massive social upheaval. Used in conjunction with newspapers, genealogical records, government records and, in time, the archives of the Land Commission, this census will allow us to paint a fuller picture of the early years of the Irish Free State in an unlimited field of inquiry.
To date, we have had the generalised datasets from the report of the 1926 census, published between 1928 and 1934, which give us some indication on how life in Westmeath changed between 1911 and 1926. They tell us, for example, that the percentage of Irish speakers in the county nearly trebled, from 3.5% to 9.8%; that the number of Protestants living here reduced by half in the span of that 15 years; and that the general population decreased by 5.3%. Now we are able to examine those statistics on a microscopic level.
Regrettably, we cannot tell how the needle moved on literacy rates in Westmeath; in 1911, 7.8% of the county’s population over the age of nine was illiterate, while a further 3.2% could read only. Unfortunately, literacy assessment was dropped as a category of inquiry for the 1926 census.
One notable feature of the census in regard to Mullingar is the decline in the town’s population from 5,539 in 1911 to 5,293 in 1926 – by no means a steep decline, but one brought about in large part by the departure of the British military in 1922. Curiously, despite a sizeable cohort of British soldiers having left Athlone, the south Westmeath town’s population increased slightly between 1911 and 1926.
Protestant decline
One controversial topic upon which more light can be shone by the 1926 census is that of Protestant depopulation in southern Ireland, which can only be explained in part by the withdrawal of the British garrison. Some have argued that the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War provided cover for ethnic cleansing of southern Protestants. Others take a more balanced view, identifying a combination of deaths in the First World War, the ravages of the Spanish flu, internal migration, economic migration as well as agrarian pressure, intimidation and violence as potential factors.
Even a cursory glance at the 1926 census returns illustrates how complex the story of Protestant depopulation in Westmeath is. For example, there is the fate of the Methodist community in Mullingar. Some 45 Methodists were recorded in the 1911 census as living in urban Mullingar; 15 years later, according to the returns, that had fallen to 10, a drop of around 77% bucking even the countywide trend.
However, there were various explanations for that population collapse, foremost among them the fact that in 1911, 40% of the Methodist population in Mullingar were soldiers. Curiously, one of the most prominent Methodist families in pre-First World War Mullingar, the draper T L Hutchinson and his family, no longer identified as Methodists but as members of the Church of Ireland or Presbyterianism by 1926; the same is true of the Tyrrell family of Ardmore. Another Methodist family, the Rodgers family, migrated to the north where the youngest brother, Hubert, became an evangelist; he died of tuberculosis in March 1921.
In the south of the county, meanwhile, were the Canfields of Goldsmith Terrace, Athlone, a Methodist family of seven who disappeared completely from Athlone and indeed Ireland between the censuses of 1911 and 1926. Between 1911 and 1919, the patriarch of the family, Thomas – a shipping manager at the Burgess and Son department store in Athlone – lost his wife Annie and their daughters Muriel and Annie Jr due to a brain haemorrhage, enteritis and heart disease respectively. Two of the Canfield sons, Edwin and Norman, served in the Great War, the latter emigrating to Canada upon discharge and settling in Winnipeg. Thomas and his surviving daughter, Ruth, joined him in Canada in 1919.
Historian and Castlepollard native, Professor Marie Coleman, has argued that the story of those Protestants who remained in the Irish Free State – among them, T L Hutchinson, the Porters, the Speers and other prominent business families from pre-revolutionary Mullingar – is as much worthy of analysis as the story of those who left. The 1926 census returns are a giant step in adding depth to our understanding of that complex topic.
Using the census
The 1926 returns are uniquely detailed, recording ages in both years and months. However, given the era’s flexible approach to official ages, users are encouraged to cross-reference data with civil birth records (www.irishgenealogy.ie) and gravestone inscriptions to confirm identities.
Successful navigation of the archives requires a firm grasp of local geography. Records are organised by townland, district electoral division (DED) and county. In urban centres, searches are categorised by city wards. Using resources like townlands.ie or street directories will be essential for locating ancestors who lived in high-density areas or shared common surnames.
If you’re having trouble finding your relatives, occasionally the surnames are listed as Gaeilge – in greater numbers compared to the 1911 census. In the latter, for example, the Ginnell family of Delvin – relatives of the MP and TD, Laurence Ginnell – are listed as Mag Fhionnghail or Ní Fhionnghail. Sometimes there are errors in transcription brought about by a lack of clarity in the forms. Occasionally, some – like this writer’s grandfather – appear with their Christian names in abbreviated form. So don’t give up!
The census consists of two primary documents: Form A (the Household Return) and Form B (the Enumerator’s Return). Form A provides an intimate portrait of daily life, detailing religion, occupation, employer information, and even ‘orphanhood’ status for those under 15. Form B focuses on the physical infrastructure, documenting the quality and occupancy of the dwellings and the acreage on which each property stood.
Unlike Britain’s roll-out of the 1921 census returns, which requires a paid subscription to third-party websites, the 1926 returns are provided to us free of charge by the National Archives at www.nationalarchives.ie/collections/search-the-1926-census/.