Friday 18 April 2014

Countdown to pre-1901 Irish census records - Monday April 28 2014

Irish Genealogy News
[updated April 28]

The National Archives of Ireland's collections of 19th-century census fragments and census search forms will be uploaded to the NAI's free Genealogy website on Monday 28 April. They will be added to the databases of FindMyPast [pay] and FamilySearch [free] at the same time. ..

The 19th-century census fragments are the surviving parts of the diennial censuses taken 1821 to 1851. ..

The Census Search Forms were the documents completed by those wishing to 'prove' their age to support an application for a state pension, following its introduction in 1908. A search was made of the paper returns for the 1841 and 1851 censuses (which had not been destroyed at this time) to see if the applicant could be identified.

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Added April 28

The National Archives, in partnership with FindMyPast and FamilySearch, has just placed online some valuable new genealogical resources which complement the material already on our genealogy website. They are: 

Census survivals, 1821–1851; surviving and copy census returns from the pre-famine period, with considerable clusters of records for places like Cavan, Meath and Antrim; 

Census Search Forms, 1841-1851; records of searches in the census records pre-1922 to provide proof of age as eligibility for the Old Age Pension, introduced in 1909. These records give names and ages of members of the family in 1841 or 1851, and very often the maiden name of the applicant’s mother. 

These collections deal with 600,000 individuals in all, a substantial record of an important period in Irish history while the final tranche of our Soldiers’ Wills covering 1917-1918 are now also available to search online.