Project organisers hope school teachers, academics and members of the public tracing their ancestors will make use of a new website of the 1911 census.
The free-to-access website, which contains the digital equivalent of more than 4,000 reels of microfilm and 3.5 million images, allows users to search for individuals by name, with each original household form giving records of a person's education, religion, profession, literacy, Irish-language proficiency and place of birth. The website currently contains records for Dublin only, but those for the rest of the country will be available next year.
"This is the first time that people will be able to do this [ search the census data] remotely and to do it with a names index. So there's going to be a lot of genealogical interest in it," said Catriona Crowe, a senior archivist at the National Archives of Ireland.
"Secondly, we hope teachers are going to use it, particularly the contextual material, so they'll be able to show schoolchildren what the city and county was like at that point in time, and do studies of their local area."
The census entries provide the particulars of each home, including the number of rooms and occupants, as well as detailed information on each townland or street. The website also features a wealth of historical and illustrative material on Dublin in 1911.
"We think people have an interest not just in their ancestors but in the kind of places they lived in at the time," said Ms Crowe. "It's not enough to say my ancestor John Murphy lived in Francis Street in 1911. What sort of place was that then? What was the city like? What was going on around him? We think this deepens the experience and makes it more interesting, and possibly may encourage people to come and visit the country."
Organisers aim to post material on the rest of the country, as well as records from the 1901 census, by the end of next year.
The early 20th-century census records are all the more important because those of the previous century were mostly destroyed. In what Ms Crowe described as "an unparalleled act of cultural vandalism", the census records from 1821 to 1851 were destroyed in an explosion at the Four Courts in 1922.
"The Four Courts was occupied by the anti-treaty forces, and they very stupidly put a huge landmine in the basement of the public records office, which at the end of June was hit by a Free State shell," she said.
Historical records from the early 14th century to the late 18th century were also lost.
Census records from the latter half of the 19th century are thought to have been pulped for recycling due to paper shortages during the the first World War.
Minister for Arts Séamus Brennan, who launched the website, said it was a "huge step forward in making some of our most important documentary heritage accessible in a modern and easily usable way."
