This week's task in Digital History is to make a spreadsheet using information given by the residents of a townland in Ballymodan, Co. Cork during the 1911 census, which is available from the National Archives of Ireland website. The townland I chose to work on was Clogheenavodig (which appears to be the correct spelling of the name, having endured an apparent temporary name change from the 1901 census, when it was known as Clagheenavodeg, although the townland must be called something else now, as it doesn't appear on Google Maps).Inputting the information was simple enough, and while calculating the averages, medians and standard deviations were more challenging, these were achievable after a little practice, using the template of the 1901 census given to us. The layout of the National Archive's website is easy enough to navigate, making the overall task of looking for information much easier. In addition, that the National Archive has already gone through the original census returns and published the information in a clear script makes the exercise of going through the census returns a less strenuous task for historians and genealogists.
The really interesting aspect of using both the 1901 and 1911 census returns are to look at the people of the area over a ten-year period to see how families changed in the course of that decade. For a start, there's two fewer houses in the townland in 1911 than there were in 1901 (fourteen instead of sixteen), and one house is unoccupied in both returns, suggesting that two houses have either been demolished or rendered in states of such disrepair that there are unfit for habitation, and a house had been abandoned in 1901 and 1911 (though not necessarily the same house).
The families who remained in Clogheenavodig between the two census returns haven't moved anywhere, but have experienced changes, including a large number of bizarre cases involving unusual ageing among the local population. The 1901 census was taken on March 31, and the 1911 census was taken on April 2, therefore you would expect people in both censuses to have aged ten years (or a maximum of eleven, allowing for a birthday on April 1 or 2). This is something which is easier to explain for older people, as registration of birth were made mandatory in the United Kingdom in 1837. However, even teenagers are listed as having a different age to what it should be, either in the 1901 return or the 1911 one. In the Singleton family, two of the children, Hannah and Cornelius (written as Con in the 1901 census) only aged nine years, while their mother, Catherine, managed to age fourteen years in ten years, presumably using those four bonus years to learn how to read and write, as she is listed in the 1911 return as being literate but could neither read nor write when the census was taken a decade previously. In addition, the missing husband of 1901 has returned, his occupation of "general labourer" suggesting that he had left Clogheenavodig to find work.
A number of deaths have almost certainly occurred: the patriarch of the Foley family, John was seventy in 1901 and does not appear in the 1911 census. His wife, Catherine, managed to age twelve years, possibly in an attempt to ensure access to the newly-provided old-age pension introduced by the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 for people aged seventy or older. Interestingly, while Catherine may have exaggerated her age, her two children only aged seven years over the course of the decade!
Perhaps the saddest death would have been that of Julia Barry, who was 22 in 1901, while living with her husband, Daniel. Ten years later, she is not mentioned, while Daniel is left with three children and listed as a widower; it would be highly plausible to assume she died in childbirth five years previously, meaning she had died before her 28th birthday. In contrast, John O'Leary enjoyed a very long life for the era, being eighty-four in 1901, though dead by 1911.
Perhaps the most interesting puzzle of the census returns from Clogheenavodig surrounds the Donovan family, which has seen two children leave the family home, Cornelius and Margaret. In their stead are two grandchildren of James and Hannah Donovan, a nine year-old named Alphonsus and a seven year-old named Francis. The two children have a different surname to their grandparents, which could imply that they are Margaret's children and that both she and her husband have either died or migrated in search of work, leaving the children in the care of her parents. This is more likely than the other possibility, which is one which would have been nearly unthinkable in a Catholic family in early twentieth century Ireland, that the two boys are the children of one of the Donovans sons, conceived and birthed out of wedlock.
In all, the research carried out by these two censuses paint an interesting picture into the life of a small rural townland, one which is replicated across the country. It perhaps leaves many more questions than answers. Where did the families present in 1901, but absent in 1911, go to and, conversely, where did the families present in 1911, but elsewhere in 1901, come from? What happened to the Burns' family servant of 1901, Mary Hayes, who had been replaced by Honora Meade by 1911? And what happened to three people who were teenagers in 1901, but not mentioned in the 1911 return: Elizabeth Burns, and Cornelius and Margaret Donovan? Had they moved elsewhere for work, or had they died in the interim? The job of a census at the time is to numerate people and determine certain facts about their lives, but census-taking benefits historians too, establishing a social element to the past, providing an insight into the lives of ordinary people, who would otherwise only be registered by the state at birth, marriage and death.
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