About the Ardmore 1926 Census Project

About this site

The 1926 Census of Ireland was the first conducted after the establishment of the Irish Free State — a snapshot of the country at the beginning of independence. This site presents those records for the Ardmore and Grange area of County Waterford: 46 townlands, roughly 2,000 people, and the households they lived in.

You can browse households by townland, search for individuals by name, explore the map, and read the statistics on language, age, and family composition. Each townland has its own page with a full household listing and a breakdown of who lived there.

The data

Census records are sourced from the National Archives of Ireland, which makes the 1926 Census freely available for reuse. This site includes content from the 1926 Census of Ireland, made available by the National Archives of Ireland under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Irish-language placenames and their meanings are sourced from Logainm.ie, the Irish Placenames Database maintained by Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU. Irish-language placename data © Government of Ireland, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Defining the Ardmore area

The 1926 Census was organised by District Electoral Division (DED) — administrative units that don't always align neatly with the boundaries people associate with a parish or village. Defining "the Ardmore area" meant choosing which DEDs to include. The core DEDs used here are Ardmore, Grange, and Glenwilliam, with a small number of individual townlands pulled in from neighbouring DEDs where they clearly belong to the Ardmore hinterland.

This is an imperfect boundary. Some townlands on the fringes may have been excluded, and others included, in ways that don't match every local understanding of where Ardmore ends. If you think a townland has been left out that should be here, please get in touch at donal@curlew.ie.

Built by

There is also a companion blog post about the project at curlew.ie/ardmore-1926-census.

Dónal Ó Tiarnaigh — a personal project combining an interest in local history, genealogy, and data. More at curlew.ie.