175,000 Irish historical records, including 60,000 pre-1901 census records previously thought to be lost, have been published online.
On 30 June 1922, the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin was destroyed in a fire during the Irish Civil War. Centuries of Irish historical records were lost, including those relating to family history – particularly the census records before 1901.
In 2022, to mark the 100th anniversary of the fire, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) was launched – an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the Public Record Office of Ireland with digitised copies of Irish documents from around the world.
On 30 June 2025, to mark its third anniversary, the VRTI announced that it had added a major new collection of records, including 60,000 19th-century census records.
A spokesperson for the VRTI told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine that although some of the new census records on the VRTI include the census fragments already available on the National Archives of Ireland’s website, the majority were new collections, from transcripts and duplicates from archives and other cultural institutions across the island of Ireland and around the world.
Dr Peter Crooks of Trinity College Dublin, Academic Director of the VRTI, said: “What we have uncovered after years of painstaking archival work will help families across the world trace their story deeper into the Irish past.”
The other new additions to the VRTI are:
- The Age of Revolution Portal, with documents covering the 1798 Rebellion and Ireland’s links to the American Revolution, including documents from the Library of Congress in America.
- The Age of Conquest Portal, with five million words of Anglo-Norman (1170-1500) Irish history translated into English.
- State Papers Ireland, with over 10 million words on governing Ireland in the dramatic years following Cromwell’s death (1660-1720).
- Knowledge Graph Explorer, a new tool for identifying people and places, and the links between them, in the records.