The Irish Times has reported that a detailed 1911 census is now available. Access for it is free at http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/.
The front page has general information on the census and on life in Ireland in 1911, but the search form is one link down. You can search the census by a variety of factors, including first and last name, street, and approximate age in 1911 (plus or minus five years.)
I did a search for John Field (I’m kind of on a John Field kick at the moment) and got 38 results. Results are presented in a table that includes name, county, age, and sex. Click on the surname or first name and you’ll get a list of all the people in that household along with their ages and gender. Beneath that you’ll get a list of the other forms associated with this household (for instance, household return, outbuilding return, etc.)
The unusual thing about this census, though, is there’s no built-in viewer for these additional documents. They’re PDF, so you’ll have to use your browser’s PDF viewer or download the files. I downloaded a household file just to see what was in it. If you’ve ever done genealogy research before it’ll look very familiar as a census file. Information include the names of folks in the household, their relationship to the head of the household, and so on. Other information, less usual to a census form in my experience, includes the religion of the people in the household, whether they can read or write, and their licensed professions.
Congratulations to the Irish Times, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary! (I think that’s about 1 million in Internet years.) The newspaper announced yesterday that to celebrate it would be making access to its digital archive free until April 6th.
The digital archive goes all the way back to 1859 and is available at http://www.irishtimes.com/search/archive.html. Make sure you click on the 2nd tab, the one that reads “Digital Archive: Search the Irish Times Paper from 1859 to Present”. (There’s also a text archive but it only goes back to 1996.)
I did a search for “George Boole” and was surprised to get over 4700 results. The archive notes that quote marks work to keep keywords in a group, but I found in my search results lots of references to Saint George and none to the mathematician. It was only when I used the “Refine By” option in the search results to search for “George Boole” again that I got a much more reasonable 77 results.
Search results are listed oldest first and in this case the results started with the obituary of George Boole. Interestingly there are no other archive mentions of him again until 1956, and according to the trendline to the right of the search results, archive mentions seem to peak around 1994/1995.
Archive results show a snippet of the actual page image, not a text snippet. Click on the snippet and you’ll get an image of the newspaper page itself, with the section of where your keywords appear highlighted. It might take a moment for the page image to load, but I found all the images — even back to 1859 — pretty easy to read. You can click and drag on the page to move it around, or you can click on the thumbnail of the page image on the right side of the screen to move to a different part. Page sections seem to load article by article; this works fine for more recent versions of the newspaper (the last sixty or seventy years?) but for the 19th century editions, where pages are just rows and rows of columns, it can get a little confusing.
I spent a great deal of time browsing and reading the archives and was never asked for money or even to login or register. You’ve only got a week or so to enjoy this archive for free!
