Irish manuscript census records : A neglected source of information

Abstract

The study of the nineteenth‐century geography and social history of Ireland has been severely handicapped by the destruction of the vast majority of the manuscript material collected in connection with the decennial censuses. Documents from the 1861–1891 censuses were never preserved ; those from the 1813–1851 censuses were largely lost in the destruction of the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922. The surviving material from the 1813–1851 period has been surprisingly little used by researchers into the nineteenth century. This paper lists those manuscript records that have survived for areas large enough to be worthy of geographical investigation and it also demonstrates the range of information given in each set of manuscripts. The contents of the fully extant 1901 and 1911 census enumerators’ returns are also given.