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Time travel and mysteries in the Irish census

by clareodea8 Comments on Time travel and mysteries in the Irish census

The National Archives will release the 1926 Irish Census online next month, the first census of the Irish Free State. For those of us who’ve enjoyed exploring the 1901 and 1911 pre-independence censuses this is an exciting moment.

The Kings, the Geoghegans, the O’Deas, the Sullivans. My four grandparents’ families were busily living their lives in the early 1900s in Connemara, Dublin and Kilkenny. Some things I know about them through family lore but there are, of course, lots of blanks.

What if I could send a spy into each household to get a more exact picture of how things were for them at a certain moment in time? Actually, I can. The work has already been done, in the 1901 and 1911 census, and today, anyone can look over the shoulder of the enumerator. Search here.

Connemara clues

But when I started exploring the entries online, I didn’t only find answers – I also stumbled across a few mysteries. I’ll start with the largest family, the Kings in Moyrus, Connemara. In 1911, Festy and Maggie had ten children living at home aged between 22 and three. My grandmother, the youngest, was born later that year.

The Kings were just about to launch on a chain of emigration that would see eight of those 11 offspring emigrate. The mystery is that Festy and Maggie both aged very rapidly between 1901 and 1911. In the first census, they were aged 45 and 30. Ten years later, Margaret had aged an extra ten years to become 50. Meanwhile, Festus had gained five extra years to end up a youthful 60.

What could have caused this mix-up? After asking around, I found out that there was an epidemic of rapid ageing in the country between 1901 and 1911. The catalyst was the old age pension that was introduced for people aged over 70 in 1908. No wonder people were keen to hurry things along.

Fifty kilometres away in Derryglin near Oughterard, the Geoghegan family were soon to welcome the birth of my grandfather Thomas. The mystery here was that I couldn’t find the family. Parents Mary and Thomas were not where they were supposed to be. But after a while, Mary and three children turned up in a nearby townland called Lettercnaff. Was Thomas away working perhaps? Why was Mary staying with her in-laws? Whether it was for one night or longer, perhaps the time to build a new house, it’s not clear from that snapshot in time.

Kilkenny baby

The 1911 census took place on the 2nd of April. My grandmother had been born in the Brewery House of Sullivan’s Brewery in Kilkenny City six weeks earlier, the first child of Richard Sullivan and Margaret, Peggy. But the mystery is that baby Elizabeth was not recorded in the census at all, and neither were her parents anywhere to be found in Kilkenny. You would think they would be proud to include their new baby. You would think the mother would be in the same place as her almost newborn baby.

But no, the couple turned up in the census, 100 kilometres away in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, in the home of Peggy’s parents, the Redmonds. We’ve tried to puzzle this out in the family but there really is no way of knowing where baby Elizabeth was on the 2nd of April 1911. What we do know is that the brewery went out of business very shortly afterwards and Richard emigrated to Australia alone, never to return.

Dublin dynasty

Now we’re on to the last of the four families, the O’Deas in Dublin city. In this case, another absence made me curious. In 1911, the head of the family 61-year-old James O’Dea was living with his third wife Martha on Capel Street, probably in the same building as his hardware shop. The couple, both originally from Kilkenny, lived with two of their joint children, Jimmy and Rita, three of James’s older children, and two servants. Two other children, including my grandfather Joseph, were living away from home in a small boarding school in Kilcoole, Co. Wicklow for boys under the age of 12, run by the Holy Faith Sisters. My aunt gave me the tip of where to look for little Joe. The family obviously had their reasons for sending the boys away. Martha was running a toy shop on the quays so they had a lot on. Two generations later, my father was also in the toy business.

Jimmy and Rita both trained as opticians and Rita ran a shop in Duke Street for many years. Jimmy went on to enjoy a successful career as a stage, radio and screen actor, best known for his role as King Brian in the movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People and as the creator of his most famous character Biddy Mulligan. During the making of Darby O’Gill, he got on very well with Walt Disney.

There was no 1921 census because the Irish War of Independence was happening then. I’m sure a lot of us are very curious to see what details and stories will emerge next month. Let me know if you find any surprises.

ps. My phone was stolen from my backpack in Fribourg train station at the weekend so I might be slow to respond to messages and pay bills! The photo of Inishbofin was the only one I could find of Connemara, taken on a happy day-trip there from Moyrus in 2015.

About Switzerland, The everyday

All of life on a Swiss boulevard

by Leave a Comment on All of life on a Swiss boulevard

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Every town is a collection of businesses at different stages of their life cycle – fledgling, midlife, waning, and shuttered for good.

The town I live in, Fribourg in Switzerland, was founded in 1157. Many generations have made their living here. It is built in and around a gorge, which also happens to be the geographical line separating the French-speaking Swiss from the German-speaking Swiss. It’s got history and medieval architecture in spades. For a guided walk around the most interesting parts of the town, see this blog post. 

Fribourg was first settled around the river bank, growing upwards on steep slopes, century by century. When the Swiss constitution was created in 1848, the area of Pérolles was just fields. But when the trainline came to Fribourg, it brought new energy to the periphery, and by the turn of the century the new Boulevard de Pérolles, and its side streets, was the happening part of town.

The boulevard is about a kilometre long, starting at the train station and ending at a bunch of new university buildings. There’s a cinema on Pérolles, a church with a declining congregation, a newspaper with a declining circulation, a bank, a secondary school, various bars and restaurants, clothes shops, hairdressers, a small shopping centre and lots of apartments. The dentists and doctors of Fribourg have their surgeries on the upper floors of this street. The strangest business is a shop that offers ‘acqua-ness’, cycling in tank of water in your own private cabin.  

But despite all this activity, Pérolles does not have the feel of a thriving street. Shops change hands too often and many businesses appear to be hanging on by a thread. The longest shopfront on the street is FriCash, a store that offers cash for jewellery and household goods. This lack of vitality is probably to do with the fact that the street is bordered by a gorge on one side and not leading anywhere in particular. The rest of the town, situated to the north and west of Pérolles forms a better-connected core.

Yet many things have happened on Pérolles in my 15 years in Fribourg. I had 30 anti-allergy injections on 30 separate visits (that didn’t work) on Pérolles. I had my Swiss citizenship interview in an office on Pérolles. I learned to speak German in the adult education centre off Pérolles. And I found out I was pregnant with twins at a gynaecologist on Pérolles. I’ve had fillings filled at the dentist on this street, I’ve had my hair cut here many times, I’ve celebrated birthdays and anniversaries on this street, and now I rent office space in an old chocolate factory just a few yards from the boulevard.

Two awful things have happened on Pérolles in my time living here. One day, a man stabbed his toddler in the toilets of the shopping centre. The mother ran with the injured child to a clinic just off the boulevard but they could not save him. Desperately sad.

A few years later, a tailor whose shop was next door to a café, flew into a murderous rage. He was having a long-running row with the café owner about the café’s street tables infringing on his shop front. One day, he grabbed a scissors, stormed into the café and stabbed his neighbour in the heart.

Miraculously, the injured man survived. I read a newspaper article about him some years later, written after the trial. Although he had recovered physically, he could not get over the crime because his attacker did not receive a custodial sentence – just a suspended sentence and a fine. The lack of punishment tormented the victim so much. But that is the Swiss justice system. You can deliberately stab someone in the heart in anger and not go to jail. Suspended sentences are the norm as jail is mainly reserved for those at risk of reoffending.

You can park on Pérolles, one franc per half hour. Two bus routes also carry people up and down the street and into the suburbs. And if you look closely, you will see that all of life is there.