Making sense of the 1911 Census

IT WAS the year of a royal visit, a census, widespread unemployment, soaring emigration, stagnant economic growth, saturation sports coverage and uproar over senior public servant pay.
Dublin 1911 is a lavish volume that chronicles a year – one that shared much with 2011 – in the life of a city using newspaper excerpts, advertisements and, most strikingly, photographs. The book is edited by Catriona Crowe, senior archivist at the National Archives, who will appear at the Ennis Book Club Festival on March 4.
Structured by calendar months, Dublin 1911 offers a snapshot of the period through both contemporary artefacts and 17 short essays focusing on themes such as poverty, religion and fashion. It was inspired by the National Archives’ publication of the 1911 Irish census website.
“The site has been a huge success,” explains Ms Crowe, whose father’s family hails from Clare. “I think it’s had 600 million hits at this point in time and about 12 million unique visits. So it’s one of the most successful Irish cultural websites ever.” Developed in partnership with Library and Archives Canada, the 1911 census is completely digitised allowing for searches by occupation, religion and profession, for example, as well as by name and area.
Previously, knowing a family’s location was vital to tracing them in the census records. Tracking rural dwellers was easier as they tended to stay in the same townland for generations. “But if your ancestors lived in urban areas where people moved around a lot, it would’ve been almost impossible to find them if you didn’t know where they were,” she says. “Because you can now search by name, you can find people that until now could never have been located.”
The National Archives has digitised both the 1911 and 1901 censuses and while making these records available on its website was a complex process, involving over nine million entries, the rewards have been significant.
“I’m personally delighted with the way that Irish people have taken the 1911 and 1901 censuses to their hearts,” says Ms. Crowe. “I’m a great advocate of history for the people. I love history to be de-mystified, made simple. For me, the greatest success of this is that primary source material and census returns are now completely understandable by any ordinary person who has the use of a computer.”
While the original newspaper reports in Dublin 1911 give a flavour of the year’s major events, it’s the ordinary details that powerfully evoke the period. For example, most women had their clothes made for them, a demand that was met by over 3,000 dressmakers and 600 milliners; over one-third of married women had seven or more children and most suburban Dubliners had at least one servant.
Staggeringly, 26,000 families lived in inner city tenements and there were more than 80 cross-channel sailings per week from Dublin to Britain. “These figures point to a city of great poverty and massive emigration,” says Ms Crowe. “People were getting the hell out of there because there were no jobs for them and because of the shockingly overcrowded living conditions: Dublin had worse slums in 1911 than Glasgow or London did and the mortality rate was higher in Dublin than for either of those two cities.”
Three generations of one family occasionally shared these congested spaces and a hallmark of this Royal Irish Academy publication is that it lends an insight into the daily hardship of these conditions and emphasises the massive discrepancies between people’s expectations at the turn of the century and today.
“It makes you think what kinds of lives people lived then,” she says. “Large families lived very close to each other, often in one or two rooms.” The photographs hint at “what that felt like, and trying to manage in a world like that, with very poor sanitary conditions, often with only one tap for water, shared among a large number of people, with water having to be hauled up several flights. It challenges all of our ideas about privacy.”
Epitomising the parallels between 1911 and 2011 is the visit of King George V and Queen Mary, the last by a British head of state until Queen Elizabeth II last year. As the economic situation and social life – the pub was at the heart of popular culture – resonant with today, are there lessons in the book?
“I’m afraid I’m a bit too long in the tooth to think that anyone learns anything from history,” Ms Crowe laughs. “If not lessons, there are rueful smiles to be enjoyed at some of the comparisons between then and now.”
As part of her role at the National Archives, Ms Crowe is also one of the editors of the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series. Its eighth volume of State source material, covering the period 1945-48, will be published later this year.
Outside work, Ms Crowe is chairperson of SAOL, a rehabilitation initiative in Dublin’s north inner city for women with drug problems. It provides an education and counselling service for women and a crèche and after-school project for their children. She is also chairperson of the Irish Theatre Institute, which promotes professional Irish theatre nationally and internationally and delivers financial support and mentoring to new theatre companies.
Invested with high production values, as illustrated by the absorbing census returns replicated on the inside front and back covers, Dublin 1911 is a handsomely crafted record of a city on the cusp of the dramatic changes looming in the revolutionary decade and it suitably complements the 1911 census website. An unforeseen consequence of publishing the census data is that it has helped remove the historical stigma of poverty. 
“One of the interesting side effects is that people may have stopped feeling ashamed of having poor ancestry,” says Ms Crowe. “Most of us in Ireland come from poor backgrounds, originally, but there was often great shame in discussing coming from the tenements or from a small rural dwelling and I think the census has done something to alleviate that. It has inspired people to look with a different eye at their ancestors who were heroically rearing large families in very difficult times.”
Dublin 1911 is published by The Royal Irish Academy.