Technical Briefing – Project 1

The speech involved a powerpoint presentation. The text below is the notes from the ppt but I didn’t use them after the first slide. Ran a bit over time at 11min+ but given the amount of information I was trying to cover I’m not surprised. Just need to be tighter on the extras. Pleased overall. Evaluation was good.

__________________________________

Slide 1

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and welcome guests.

More and more information is becoming available online about the history of our people and our communities. Accessing it is easy and following the footprints left by previous generations can be both interesting and enjoyable. Tonight, I want to show you just one source of online information: the National Archives of Ireland website. This website has made available, as recently as last August, census records from 1911.

Slide 2

Here is the welcome page from the online archive. As you can see there is a whole load of links here that you can brows at your leisure. What we are interested in tonight are two links: 1.The SEARCH CENSUS link , The BROWSE CENSUS link

Household Occupants

Slide 3

Which ever way you go you will end up on a page like this. This page is for an individual household on the night of the census. It shows the SURNAME, the FORENAME or Christian name, the AGE and the SEX of the individual. The National Archives have promised that this page will include the rest of the information entered on the form before the end of the year. But in the mean time we need to look at the image of the actual form itself if we want to know more.

This is the record of a single household

Slide 4

This is the most important form, FORM A.

CHRISTIAN NAME

SURNAME

RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

RELIGION

AGE

This is interesting for what else it can tell us. We can get the year of birth. If the person was born after 1864 then the registry office will have a birth certificate. That birth certificate can give you the mother’s maiden name and where she was living at the time of marriage. It also gives the fathers name and occupation and where they were living.

OCCUPATION

Here we have Vintner and that’s a big clue as to which famous Carrigaline Pub we are talking about. We see William was a Carpenter, Denis the son, an Assurance agent and Edward was a clerk.

MARRIED/SINGLE

YEARS MARRIED

This column again helps us find a new direction for our search. Margaret and Denis were 30 years married in 1911 making their year of marriage 1881. Again its after 1864 so there is a marriage cert for them. This will also given the women’s maiden name. It also has both father’s names and occupations.

CHILDREN BORN

This column gives the number of children born but also how many were still alive. It was quite common for families to loose several children at a young age.

CHILDREN SURVIVING

WHERE BORN

Another source of surprise can be this next column which tells were the individual was born. The parents may have been more in another county or have moved at some stage with different children born in different places. This can be very important information when searching for births certs.

SIGITURE

One other interesting item is the signature. Whereas the enumerator may well have filled out the form, here you will often have the actual signature of your ancestor. Sometime when they couldn’t write the name is written by the enumerator and an X is added with the comment “his mark”.

Slide 5

This is Form B1. This tells us about the families neighbors and who they were but it can also tell us about what the buildings around them were used for. Here we see Household 11 is a Public House. This matches nicely with the description of Denis Cogan as Vintner and lets us know the family were living in the pub. These columns tell us about the size and quality of the building, whether it was thatched and how many windows it had in front. All this gives an indication of how well off they were. Look at household number 8. It has 6 rooms and 5  windows in front. But there are also 14 out houses. This dwelling was occupied by the Cantellions. This last column tells us they owned the house because if they didn’t this column would tell us who the leased it from.

Form B2

Slide 6

This is Form B2. This can be a very interesting form because of what it tells us about the other buildings used by the family. The Cantellions had 3 stables, 2 coach house, 2 harness rooms, a cow house, a piggery, a boiling house, 2 sheds and 2 stores. I’m assuming this was Beaver Lodge which once stood over here behind the hotel.

Form N

Slide 7

This final Form is Form N. The form doesn’t add much information on the individual housholds because it only lists religious affiliation. But it’s the stuff up the top that can be useful in your research. We have the County as Cork East Riding. The Parliamentary Division as Cork South East. The District Electoral Division is Carrigaline. We can also see the official name of the town land or street, the barony and the Civil Parish. Note that the Civil Parish, the Roman Catholic Parish and the Church of Ireland Parish can be 3 very different things. All this information is very useful if your extend your search further to local maps and maybe even to the Griffiths Valuations maps of some 60 years earlier. But that will have to wait for another occasion.

Madam Toastmaster