On Sunday, April 2nd, 1911, a 28-year-old maths professor called "Edward de Valera" filled out his census form at home at Morehampton Terrace in Dublin. Across town, Oliver St John Gogarty did the same. In the marital status column he wrote "single", then crossed it out and replaced it with "married", apparently remembering Martha, his wife of five years.
Meanwhile, one William B Yeates (sic), a "dramatic author and poet" was recorded in the company of Lady Gregory at Nolan's Hotel on South Frederick Street.
These are some of the fruits of a trawl through the historical treasury that is the 1911 census, details of which can be accessed online today for the first time.
The digitisation project, which was developed over several years by the National Archives of Ireland in partnership with Libraries and Archives Canada, gives users the chance to search the census by first or family name.
Each entry includes a person's education, religion, profession and place of birth. A category for "children still living" suggests some astonishing child mortality rates - the return for Marjorie Dixon of Buckingham Street shows that she had lost seven of her 13 children during her 28-year marriage. Another column asks people, in the jargon du jour, if they are "deaf and dumb; dumb only; blind; imbecile or idiot; or lunatic."
Caitríona Crowe, senior archivist at the National Archives, said the census gives a picture of a city on the brink of great change. "We find it very difficult now to look at 1911 without thinking of 1916, the first World War and the 1913 lockout, but nobody in 1911 knew anything about those things at the time - they were living in a different world that hadn't changed fundamentally."
The site contains the digital equivalent of 4,000 reels of microfilm and 3.5 million images. It currently holds records for Dublin only, but project organisers aim to post forms for the rest of the country - as well as details of the 1901 census - next year.
Some entries are missing, of course. They include those for the suffragettes Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Anna Haslam and Louie Bennett, all members of the Irish Women's Franchise League, who decided to boycott the census in protest at not having the vote.
When a policeman interrupted one of their meetings on the night before census day to remind them that it was illegal not to fill out the form, the women told him they had arranged for airplanes and submarines to remove them from the soil of Ireland for the night of April 2nd.
"It's a shame in a way that we don't have the census returns, but you can see their point," said Ms Crowe.
