In the four years after the Famine, 40,000 emigrated from Kerry
There were many tragedies during the Irish Civil War – personal, family and community tragedies which scarred generations of Irish people. But another great tragedy of the conflict was the loss of ten of thousands of public records dating back to the 1100s.
In April 1922, anti-Treaty IRA occupied the Four Courts buildings in Dublin, where the Public Record Office of Ireland was located. The occupying forces established their munitions factory and store in the Record Treasury building.
On 30 June, as the shelling of the Four Courts by the National Army began, an explosion in an adjacent building started a fire which spread to the Record Treasury archive where the munitions were being manufactured. The fire destroyed much of the building and practically all the records in the Treasury. Within a few hours most of seven centuries of Ireland’s historical records were gone.
In recent years, painstaking work has been underway to restore anything which survived, source copies of items held in other repositories and to share what has been collected. Last week, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland released over 175,000 historical documents, identified in partner archives in Ireland and around the world, which replace the records lost in 1922.
Among the material published are the censuses of the Irish population which were taken in the nineteenth century. This collection contains all the Census Commissioners’ Report and statistical tables for 1821, 1831 and 1841. It contains the General Reports for 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891, and county tables for 1851 and 1861. County tables for 1871, 1881 and 1891 will be made available by September 2025
The reports for Kerry between 1821 and 1851 are particularly informative, not least because they help us to gauge the impact of the Famine on the population and provide other insights on the demographics of the county in this import period. The records are not as elaborate or extensive as those from the 1901 and 1911 censuses which have proved to be extremely popular for genealogists and historians in recent years. We don’t get, for example, individual forms from households, apart from a few fragments. But we can glean interesting snippets not just about population trends but also other information about Kerry in the nineteenth century.
1821 Census
In 1821, Kerry accounted for just 3% of the Irish population. The population – or the “number of souls” in the county at the time of the 1821 Census was 216,185, a number which had risen from 178,622 in 1813. The number of “houses” in the county was 35,597. Some 18 homes were located on the “Blasquet of Ferriter’s Islands” off the west coast and where 128 inhabitants were recorded.
Approximately 70,000 people were categorised as being in employment: 35,000 or half of those were working in agriculture and 19,000 in “trades, manufacture or handcraft.” Remarkably the ages of 305 people in the county could not be ascertained, with some likely unaware of the precise date on which they were born. At a time when life expectancy was considerably lower than it is now, the census enumerators did discover several individuals aged 100 or older, including in Ballyheigue, Kilmoyley, Listowel, and Dysart.
A small handful of surviving family returns are published from 1821 including those of the McSweeney family of Main Street, Killarney, the Rice family of Derrilahan, Kenmare and three Moriarty families living in Blennerville village.
The 1821 Report offers some information on education in Kerry. In the “Town and Commons of Dingle” which was also listed in the report as “Dingle-i-couch” (presumably Daingean Uí Chúis), there was “a school of 100 children, supported by the Parish, and one of 100 boys, supported by subscription.” In Tralee, there was a school run by the London Hibernian Society for 49 students while 150 girls were being taught “in the Convent”. Killarney was home to a Catholic school for 250 girls.
One very rare comment which was included in the Kerry survey for 1821 points to the endemic poverty and poor economic conditions which prevailed in the years before the Famine. The margin of the census report includes an observation on rural Kenmare:
“The enumerator states that ‘the people of Glanerough Barony are wretchedly poor and many half starved, from the want of employment” and he also observes that in most cases where he returns farmers, “they cannot be properly called so, having no plough or other farming utensils but the spade.”
1841 Census
The census which was taken in 1841, just four years before the potato famine began, puts the population of Kerry at just short of 300,000, twice as many as those who live in the county today. This was an enormous increase of 35% since 1821 and reflects the significant growth in the Irish population in the early nineteenth century.
Some 90% of Kerry people were classified as living in “rural” areas at this time with over three quarters working in agriculture. What was termed “first class accommodation” was occupied by 7% of the population nationally but this was just 0.6% in Kerry. This placed the county as having the sixth worst standard of accommodation in Ireland.
The 1841 Census tells us that Kerry had the second highest rate of emigration per head of population, just behind Waterford. This was before the Famine took hold and forced so many more to leave Kerry and Ireland and also highlights the dearth of work and prospects generally for this generation of our ancestors.
In 1841, 70% of people in Kerry could not read or write – the fourth highest in country – this compared with just 28% of people in Belfast city who could not read or write. Kerry was among the top four counties in Ireland for death from measles in children and among the top five counties for deaths from diarrheoa and dissentry. This impoverished society, already denuded of countless emigrants and reliant so heavily on the land for survival was ill-equipped to cope with the starvation and horrors which followed a few years later.
1851 Census
To nobody’s surprise, the first Census taken in Ireland after the worst of the Famine was over shows a dramatic slump in population. In Kerry in 1851, the population had dropped by one fifth in ten years – from 299,000 in 1841 to 238,000 in 1851. The rapid decline in the numbers living in Kerry offers a tangible insight into the real effects of the potato blights and its consequences. In another stark reflection of what had befallen the county, there were over 27,000 people in workhouses in Kerry in 1851, the second highest number in Munster, just behind Cork. Thus, almost 10% of the population of Kerry were living in workhouses as the Famine came to an end.
The effects of the Famine are evident too in terms of employment: in the 1851 Census, we can see that the numbers working in agriculture had dropped from 77% in 1841 to 58%. Emigration had soared: those emigrating were categorised in the Census Report as those who had left the county “stating it to be their intention not to return.”
Between 1851 and 1855, a total of 39,520 people emigrated from Kerry – with the intention of not returning – that is the equivalent today to the population of Tralee and Killarney combined. By 1861, the county’s population was approximately 200,000, and back to where it had been forty years before.
These remarkable records cast new light on an incredibly dark period in Irish history but they also us to better understand what life was like in Kerry in the 1800s. There is much more to discover at www.virtualtreasury.ie
