It’s here

100 years to the day at 00:01 on 18th April 2026, the National Archives has gifted genealogists and historians with the long-awaited public release of the Irish Free State’s 1926 census. The link to search is here. It’s free to access and you don’t need to register an account.

What’s on it?

This is a snapshot of everyone in the 26 counties on 18th April. You will find people in family groups, with their relationship to the head of the household documented. You will also find people in institutions like boarding schools, prisons, hospitals and county homes. Information is also provided about the building. My favourite inclusion is the much better detail on birthplace, which now gives a townland/town as well as a county.

How to search

You can search by name, county, townland and DED (district electoral division) at present. Future phases will include the ability to do free-text searches and by occupation and birthplace. You can make use of an asterisk as a wildcard to replace letters. So searching an asterisk * on either side of mahon will find variants of Mahon and Mahony with and with the O and with or with an e (O’Mahony, Mahoney, Ó). Fadas work in the search too.

Results come as a table with 30 entries by default, but you can change to 50 or 100 and change what the results are sorted by.

I notice the sort by age is not working at the moment. As a short-term measure, you could download the table to a spreadsheet program and sort by that column if you have a lot of data.

You can also use also use the filters on the side panel to narrow down results to an age group or by townland, religion, sex, etc.

Let’s look at an example of the person page now.

The view defaults to an individual but you toggle to “view household record” to see the family group. We get a small summary of the person’s details. Can you spot the likely transcription error? Click on Household form A1 to see the digital image.

Yes, Denis Cahalane is 44 not 14. It’s a nice clear hand so the machine reading hasn’t picked this up right. Most of the transcription errors I’ve noticed so far (and there aren’t many) pertain to the age column and are often the fault of the green over-writing, which is statiticians notes about classifications within each category. There’s no error reporting mechanism at the moment. The FAQ notes

Bilingual

A lot of media has focused on this being the first census where people could complete the form in Irish. This isn’t quite the case. There’s lots of entries in Irish on the previous 1911 census and some from 1901 too. Here’s an example from Meenmore East, Co. Donegal.

But what was different this time was the form was double-sided and the instructions were in Irish on one side and English on the other. The below example is from Renmore in Galway.

Maps!

I was really hoping the National Archives would learn from their past websites and include a map this time and I am not disappointed at all! It’s difficult to demonstrate this with screenshots but the map allows you to zoom into a location. They have a full page for explaining how the map works.

Once you get to a certain resolution, the map becomes shows first the DEDs.

Zoom in even further and it becomes the 1924 Ordnance Survey map, which is cool. On the right hand side, you can choose between demographics and townlands. These then link to the full return for that townland.

There’s so much here to explore and learn. I’m deliberately not being negative in this newsletter. Of course, there are things we’d like or errors we’re spotting, but let’s take the time to celebrate the release before we completely pick it apart.

I’ve got some articles I just want to link to for now on related points. Watch my blog over the coming weeks. I’ll post about different aspects and may even throw in the odd video for Gen Z!

• My article on streets and places that changed name after Irish independence to help the diaspora and newer researcher. If you know of any more, let me know & I’ll add them.

• Centenarian ambassadors. The 48 people still alive who feature on the census. 9 of them are nuns! The Irish Times did a piece interviewing a couple of them.

• A list of seemingly ever-increasing talks and workshops that I’m offering on the new census.

Happy searching, everyone. I want to hear about your finds! Let me know of issues too and maybe I can help you work around them.