CENSUS 1926: Taking a trip back in time

John Donohoe delves into the 1926 Census records in a search for his roots, finding some puzzles answered, but more questions too

The 1926 Census records offer a fascinating insight into day-to-day life in the Ireland of a century ago – who was living where, with whom, what their employment was, and other details relating to education, marital status, language, and property or farm ownership.

Many people will have an idea of their family backgrounds but may not know much about the lives of their ancestors 100 years ago. The 1926 Census release shines a light into the past. In our house, we knew a lot of the general information, that the Donohoes moved from Athboy to Killeen circa 1910, that some of my great grandparents had died tragically young, that one grandfather had come from Galway working with neighbouring farmers, and that there were deep roots around Kilmessan too.

The 1926 Census puts flesh on the bones of the story, filling in gaps, but also creating more questions. Who is this, what’s their connection, why is someone missing?

There are four primary families on our tree – Donohoe, Englishby, Hanbury, and Dempsey, spread across Meath. Then, a generation back, Allen, Vaughan, Reid, Glynn, and a stepfamily of Plunkett.

In 1926, the Donohoe household consisted of my great grandfather, Peter, his sons, James and Peter; nieces, Lena and Julia Cahill; and cousin, Barney Callaghan. Peter's wife, Ellen, had died in November 1910 in Athboy, it seems from complications following childbirth, not uncommon at the time.

Peter Donohoe, head of household, is listed as a widower at 58 years of age. His occupation as ‘cattle dealer’ is crossed out on the form, and ‘farmer’ written instead. Employment is of his ‘own account’ and he has 80 acres. His son, James (20) and Peter (19), are listed as ‘assisting father’. ‘Cattle Dealer’ is also crossed out by the enumerator, Garda Mulloney of Dunshaughln, on their entries.

Barney Callaghan, whose place of birth is also listed as Athboy, is described as a second cousin, and a ‘farm labourer’. The enumerator is a great stickler here; he has crossed out ‘farm worker’.

With no mother in the house, the Cahill nieces from Clonmellon, Julia (24) and Lena (18) are on ‘home duties’. These ladies were both later to marry in Skryne – Julia to John Hogarty and Lena to Jack Waters of Ross.

Missing from the household is the oldest lad, Thomas. The brothers had all been separated when younger after the death of their mother, staying with relatives, but in 1926, Thomas was in the seminary in Maynooth, studying for the priesthood. It took a while to find him – he had signed his form as Gaeilge, in a distinctive old Irish script. So it wasn’t coming up easily in a search, as it was in Irish with dots instead of h – Tomas O Donncada, and the address is Collegelands, Maynooth. He was 22.

All of this information got me thinking of the previous census releases, from 1901 and 1911, which I had never really gone into too deeply, but now felt the urge to dig a bit further. It turns out that the Donohoes were still in Athboy in 1911, with the census taken just five months after that untimely death of Ellen. The boys – Thomas, James, and Peter were with their 80-year-old grandmother, Jane, on Market Street, where the family had owned a pub. There is no sign of their father. He travelled to the UK a lot selling cattle and may have been away.

But an interesting entry in the 1911 census is a five-month-old boy, Michael Donohoe, in the care of a Margaret Kavanagh and her daughter, Kate, at Eighty Eight Acres, Athboy. This must be the baby who was born before Ellen Donohoe died, and who was himself to die in an accident in the woods in Dunsany as a young lad before the next census would be taken. But who were the Kavanaghs? Relatives, or kindly neighbours perhaps, who took in the newborn baby.

A decade further back to the 1901 census finds Ellen Donohoe as Ellen Allen, described as a confectioner and with her sister Julia (later Mrs Doran) residing with her uncle, the widowed John Gilsenan and his sister, Mary, at Stonestown, Delvin. Within a decade, she would be married, bear four sons and have passed away, with her funeral celebrated by her uncle, Fr Thomas Gilsenan, a native of Lisclogher.

Ellen Allen was from Pluckstown, Athboy, next door to my grandmother’s family, the Englishbys. While my grandfather’s mother had died, his grandmother, Julia Allen in Pluckstown was still alive, and in visiting there he would have met my grandmother, Mag Englishby.

In the 1926 census, Mag is listed as Maggie, a name we never knew her as, and she was 17 years old, living with her parents, James, mother Elizabeth (Vaughan), and siblings, Michael (35), Rose (23), Patrick (21), and Annie Kate (19) as well as a nine-year old nephew, James Foye (normally spelt Foy), son of her sister, Mary, who was working in Dublin. An older sister, Elizabeth, had already emigrated to America, while a brother, Jimmy, had also travelled to the United States after surviving the Battle of the Somme as a soldier in World War I, and sister Bridget was living with relatives nearby.

Both Maggie and Annie Kate were listed as being able to speak Irish and English, as they had been at school in Cloran, where two very patriotic sisters, the Miss Flynns, were teaching.

On the 1926 census, Mary Foy is listed at Castle Avenue in Clontarf, Dublin, as a general domestic servant for Mary Pentland and her brother Ernest, a Church of Ireland family, with their friend, Eva Lennon, also under the roof.

James Englishby is listed as a farm labourer, even though he had his own holding of 32 acres – the enumerator is clearly not as fussy as the Dunsany guard! The lads are ‘assisting on father’s farm’, and the women are on ‘home duties’, except for Maggie, 'at school' (although she was 17!)

Some 10 years later, James Donohoe and Margaret Englishby would marry and take up residence in Killeen, where she lived until reaching her 100th year in 2009.

There was the tragic loss of a great grandparent on the maternal side too – a story which is at present lost in the mists of time. The 1926 census revealed that both my grandmother, Elizabeth Dempsey, and her mother, Mary Dempsey, were living in Ringlestown House in Kilmessan; Mary as housekeeper and Elizabeth – Lily – as a general domestic servant for the widowed George Wilkinson, ‘BA TCD’, a ‘farmer and grazier’, with 200 acres, who was known to be a bit of an eccentric.

While we were aware my granny had worked in the house, we didn’t realise that she had lived there too. But maybe they had nowhere else to live, although they had come from the closeknit Clarke and Reid families in Trubley near Bective. But Mary Dempsey’s husband, possibly John, from Trim, had died in a horse riding accident at Bective, and she was already a 23 year-old widow in the 1911 census, living with her parents, Michael and Julia Reid, at Trubley, and her sisters, Kate and Lizzie, as well as her daughters, Mary Kathleen and Lizzie (Lily) Dempsey. Strangely, she is entered on the form as Mary Jane Reid, even though she was Mrs Dempsey at the time.

Ringlestown was to provide her with her second husband, Jim Plunkett, a member of Kilmessan senior hurling championship winning teams, who played for the Royal County in Croke Park. He worked as a herd on the Ringlestown estate, a job that came with a picture postcard cottage near Tara, and it was to here that she and Lily moved to on her becoming Mrs Plunkett. Sadly, Mary’s eldest daughter had died as a young girl of around nine or 10. The burial plot of the Dempseys is unknown but may be in Newtown Cemetery in Trim.

In 1926, James Plunkett was a 44-year-old living at Ringlestown with his niece, Mary, and was entered as working as a shepherd for George Wilkinson. His place of birth was Dunderry, and his niece’s listed as Robinstown. He lived to the ripe old age of 98, passing away in 1980.

The one line of the family tree not so deep rooted in Meath was the Hanbury side, and it took a while to find my maternal grandfather, Matt Hanbury, as he wasn’t at home on census night. Nor was his name spelt as he later spelt it. His parents were Patrick and Annie 'Hanberry' (nee Glynn) of Rerower (or Reyrawer) Co Galway, between Loughrea and Gort, close to Yeats’ Thoor Ballylee. He was the eldest of the then family of 10, and on the night in questions was listed as a visitor in Divineys in Kilbeacanty, a family he worked for and ultimately came to Meath with when they bought a farm in Riverstown, Kilmessan. While his family were listed as Hanberry, he is entered as 'Hansbury' by Garda James Lynch, the enumerator. Pat and Josephine Diviney and their daughter, Mary (later Mrs Aidan Murray of Balgeeth, Kilmessan) were also amongst the gathering in the house that night. On his marriage to Lily Dempsey, Matt Hanbury moved into the Plunkett homestead in Ringlestown on the slopes of the Hill of Tara. His last surviving sister, and the last of my grandparents' generation, Margaret Finnerty, who wasn’t born when that 1926 census was taken, today lives in London, aged 95, while sisters, Mary Kerwick, who was aged nine in 1926, lived until the age of 98, also in London, and Teresa McNally, aged three in 1926, was a month short of her 100th birthday when she passed away in Celbridge, Co Kildare, in September 2022.

The Story of Us: Census 1926 is a landmark exhibition marking this historic release of census records, hosted by Meath County Archive at Meath County Council for the National Archives.

It explores the world reflected in the census and reveals what life was like in 1926: in towns and cities, across rural communities and islands, from crowded urban tenements to the mansions of the aristocracy.

Using contemporary documents and photographs, audio‑visual displays, and — at its heart — the census returns themselves, the exhibition presents a vivid portrait of Ireland a century ago. Visitors will encounter stories of work and daily life, language and culture, sport and entertainment, religion, gender, and the social realities of a newly independent state.

Venue: St Mary’s Community Centre, Trimgate Street, Navan, C15 C8KX.