Built c. 1813 on a 57-acre site owned by Sir John Craven Carden (1757–1820), Richmond Barracks, when completed, was one of the largest in Ireland. Over the course of the nineteenth century it saw a large throughput of regiments, but by 1909 the barracks had been vacated. Templemore Town Council was informed by the War … Read more
Following the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the UK government interned ‘all Germans, Hungarians and Austrians of military age’ throughout Britain and Ireland, and 300 civilians were briefly interned at Richmond. When the first batch of 400 military prisoners arrived on 10 September 1914, the civilian internees were moved to camps at … Read more
The first Irish census was taken in 1821, and thereafter censuses were taken at ten-yearly intervals until 1911. The only census records to survive in their entirety are those for 1901 and 1911. The records for 1821–51 were lost in the destruction of the Public Record Office at the beginning of the Civil War in … Read more
The census records for 1901 and 1911 have been by far our most popular sources, accounting for 40 per cent of productions to readers. They were the obvious choice for digitisation when we contemplated making some of our holdings available on the internet. Irish census records differ from those of other countries in that the … Read more
The infamous Mrs Mack, who appears in the ‘Nighttown’ episode of Ulysses, kept a brothel at 85 Lower Tyrone Street in the heart of the red-light (Monto) district of Dublin. She was so well known that the area was often referred to as ‘Macktown’. The 1901 census records that Mack had five ‘lodgers’, ranging in … Read more