The 1911 Irish Census

[devogue]

On the evening of Sunday, April 2nd 1911, a couple of months before the Titanic was launched just 25 miles up the road, my great grandfather sat down to fill out the census form:

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/r ... 002219056/

A plasterer by trade, his handwriting was excellent, and the calm pride in his family can be seen in his writing - I love how he states his son's languages as Irish and English. I wonder was it a warm spring evening; were my great uncles Sam, Paddy and James told to run on and play - did little Peter trail after them or did he play with 4 year old Mary Teresa (known to all as Cissie) and 3 year old Barney?

Did my two month old Grandmother-to-be's cries fill their tiny house, was little Annie the apple of her daddy's eye? - the noise, bustle, life and family love jumps from that old page, a snap shot of a young, typical Irish family (Ireland was still united under British rule). Well, it was typical except that none of the children had died in infancy - the column in which to record dead children is a hell of a sign of the times.

My great grandparents would have two more children, Michael and Colleen, and then the march of time began...

By 1920 the three eldest sons were dead of TB, then my great grandfather died. Cissie married an eminent British judge, a descendant of Walter Raleigh - she died in 1987...the last to go before my grandmother was left alone was Colleen in the mid 1990s...my grandmother, that little 2 month old babe in the loving arms of her family so long ago, died long after them all in the presence of us, a loving family from her distant future. She was 98.

My brother brought the census to her a few months before she died, and she stared at it for such a long time.

The girls and I will bring daffodils to her grave in March.

[M]

x

[klr]

I should have posted about this before myself. I've found some of my ancestors on this as well.

[Animavore]

Interesting. There's only about 4 or 5 William Byrne's of the right age (10 or 11 depending what time of the year the census was taken) in Dublin at that time. I must ask my Dad which is my Granddad when he gets back later.