Census night: Introduction
On Sunday, the 2nd April 1911, Neal Gallagher, filled in a census form for himself, his wife Mary Ellen, and their three children, Columba, Daniel and Kathleen. Neal was from Donegal, his wife from Armagh, the oldest child was born in Cavan and the other two were Belfast-born. The migratory pathway traced out by the family, one shared by many other migrants to the boom town of Belfast, is clearly evident in the census manuscript. On a more poignant note, Mary Ellen, though only 30 years old at the time of the census, had already lost two children. She had been a young bride, married at the age of nineteen.
A few streets away, Lenead Benard helped complete a census form for himself, his wife Cassie and his nephew Harry. Unusually for Belfast, all three members of the household were Russian Jews. Lenead’s occupation was given as “dealer in horses and cattle”. Husband and wife, who had married at the ages of 16 and 17 years respectively, were both illiterate. They were also childless.
These family vignettes give a sample of the kinds of evidence available from one of the richest sources on the Irish past, the original census forms filled in by some one million households in Ireland in 1911. The census manuscripts open a momentary but revealing window on social, economic and cultural life in the Edwardian age, just before Irish society was torn apart by national and international wars.
A major task of this project is to digitise the census information on individuals and families in Belfast for the two census dates of 1901 and 1911 – virtually all earlier census records for Ireland having been destroyed by war and neglect – and to link the two. The resulting database, and associated website, should prove of value to historians of family, household and community life in the industrial capital of Ireland in the years before the Great War, partition and the coming into being of Northern Ireland.
A related task is to promote greater awareness of the cultural history and heritage of Belfast. This involves outreach activity: a series of workshops, demonstrations and seminars in community, school and library centres around Belfast. In these sessions the participants work with the census materials, access the project’s website, and address a range of issues from family history to community history, and beyond. The idea of the project, therefore, is both about history and the process of making history.
The organisation of the project is somewhat unusual, in that it brings together a variety of partners: academic historians from the School of History, students, community activists and members of the public. The organisation that directs the work is BelFam (Belfast Family & Community History) and the director is Professor Liam Kennedy. The full-time administrator and outreach officer is Nour-Eddine Khaoury. The major funding comes from the HERITAGE LOTTERY FUND, NORTHERN IRELAND, while Queen’s University supplies an office, equipment, specialist historical assistance and back-up services. The project runs from 2006 to 2009.
Again unlike conventional research programmes the work of the project is located at a number of interfaces, linking research and education, work within the academy and historical activity in the wider community, and using web technology to reach a wider audience. When completed, a multi-media website will make available a series of databases centering on the early 20th century, a photographic archive of Edwardian Belfast, as well as film clips, voice and musical recordings relating to the period. The historic photographs on this site are courtesy of the Public Record Office, Northern Ireland.
Among the various resources being created, undoubtedly the most important for academic researchers are the digitised databases derived from the hand-completed household returns for Belfast in 1901 and 1911. The sample target is about one in six Belfast households, reflecting different social conditions within the city. These resources will be made available for free to the academic and the wider community.
The historical issues illuminated by these records include people's occupations, age at marriage, family size, child mortality, migration into Belfast from the countryside, levels of education, and the extent to which different religious groups lived side by side. This resource can, in turn, be joined to other more readily accessible records like street directories and local newspapers to yield a fuller picture of life in Belfast in the years before the Great War. A number of collaborative research projects, relating to urban history and the history of the family, are being developed within the School, but these by no means exhaust the research potential of the resource.