A family secret revealed in 1901 Irish census

The 1901 census has just gone up on line providing an incredible insight into the Ireland so many of our ancestors left.

It’s at http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie

The 1911 census, which went up about a year ago attracted 7 million views and I’m sure this 1901 census will attract as many.

Of the many deeds the Irish government has done to attract interest in Ireland I firmly believe putting the 1911 and 1901 censuses on line will prove to be the most important.

For millions of Irish Americans it allows a sacred moment, a second to touch the past and to see the ancestors or relatives they have only dimly glimpsed through the mists of time.

Alas, there are no censuses available form the previous century, all were either burned or lost. So 1901 will remain the touchstone.

On the 1901 census my wife Debbie, found her great grandfather Martin McGoldrick living on the family farm in Sligo. For some reason the 1911 census seemed to miss his little village.

I could tell by her reaction just how deep and significant moment it was

It is an amazing document that allows us to reach out and touch the past on a given night on a given year in Ireland.

For my own part it was like revisiting a familiar fireside. I had seen the 1911 census count, marveled at the information I had been able to glean, including my first glimpse of my great grandfather and turned to the 1901 census feeling like I was seeing a movie rewound.

It is the 31st of March 1901 and in the Dowd house in Kilcooley, County Kerry, (there was no O’ used back then) seven miles or so west of Dingle there are 13 people living in the three –roomed residence. (the photograph above is of the view from Kilcooley to the Atlantic.)

It is five years before my father is born there.

There is my great grandfather, Ned, 60, hale and hearty and his three sons and one daughter, including Daniel Dowd who my father would be called after.

There too is my grandfather, Michael, married to Kate Kennedy, and they have three very young children, John, Maggie and Mary.

Maggie intrigues me. I had never heard of her and she does not appear in the 1911 census. Clearly she passed away sometimes in the next decade. From what I will never know, but my father never spoke of her.

Suddenly realizing I had an Aunt Maggie who did not live fills me full of curiosity about her. What happened, why was it never spoken about?

It was certainly not unusual for people to pass away back then in the age before antibiotics but it is a sad moment to realize I lost a relative so young.

John Dowd, the oldest son in my father’s family is there. He is called Jack and will later leave for America. He will settle in Detroit and work for the Ford motor Company his whole life.

He will have triplets, so rare an event that they are featured in several national magazines and I will get to know them
In 1981 I will visit him in Detroit, in the little suburban bungalow he has made his home in. He will press $20 into my hand in an envelope, as all emigrants did for new arrivals back then.

He will ask me what fields are they planting back home but I am no longer from Kerry and am unable to answer. He is the spitting image of my father.

John’s older sister, Mary, also made her way to America and Detroit but I never had the opportunity to meet her. She would die in a traffic accident.

The census has once again re-wakened all these echoes and made me aware once again of how lucky my generation was with our access to education and life choices, these relatives would only have dreamt of.

And then there’s my dead little aunt Maggie who I will never know. She is a poignant postscript to reading about my father’s family in the 1901 census.

May she rest in peace.