KILDARE 1911 CENSUS ONLINE

1911 Census Return for Domhnall Ua Buachalla, Main Street, Maynooth

It is an amazing resources and the National Archives are to be highly commended.

For the purpose of genealogical research in Ireland only the individual household census returns of the 1901 and 1911 are available for the whole country. A census was undertaken in Ireland from 1821 onwards from which statistical data and reports were complied. The census returns themselves for 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 were, by and large, lost in the fire at the Public Record Office in the Four Courts in 1922.  However, returns do survive for some counties. The census returns for 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 were destroyed by the State. 
Microfilmed copies of the 1901 and 1911 Census are held by most County Libraries in Ireland and in the national repositories of the National Archives, and National Library, Dublin. Returns from 1901 pertaining to the North of Ireland are held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.  You can use the census returns to locate an ancestor in 1911, where they were born, age and so on.

Don’t forget that there are a wide range of resources on the Kildare Library and Arts Services website under Kildare Collections and research Services which relate specifically to Co. Kildare, with live links to online parish registers etc.
Please note also the Irish Family History Foundation’s website at www.rootsireland.ie has made computerized parish registers available online as well as other sources for many Irish counties, allowing you to research your Irish ancestry.  All the county genealogy centres will carry out research on your behalf and have many sources which are not available online, including a computerized index of the 1901 census and some have fragmentary census data from earlier returns.
It is common for discrepancies in age to be thrown up by the census returns; for example, you may find that a person’s age can be four, five or more years out of line with baptismal, birth or marriage records that you have already located, or between one census return and another.  Cross checking with the census data, using known family names, occupations and place of residence will help you to establish whether a census record may be relevant.

Sometimes you must persevere and try different things. For example if you look for Donal Buckely in Maynooth because the returns were normally filled written in English you will not find the return for Domhnall O’Buachalla, indeed if you look for O Buachalla you actually have to look at every (scroll through) return for Buachalla in Co. Kildare (or DED if you know it) as the return is under Ua Buachalla. Similarly if you look for the street of Shraud (or Shrawd) in Kildare Town you will not find it in the Census as it is listed as Strand, a mistake probably made by the enumerator. So look around, try different searches. Don’t become frustrated because the beautiful thing about a searchable database is that it allows you to search across the whole country, county, DED etc etc. – you just would not be able to do this manually. So again a big thank you to the staff and Board of the National Archives.

Karel Kiely M.A.
Genealogist
Kildare Genealogy
Supported by the Kildare Town Heritage Centre and Kildare County Council Library and Arts Services. Member centre of the Irish Family History Foundation.