1926 Census: A century of Irish life in one click
"The National Archives of Ireland working in partnership with Deloitte transcribed 1.5 million handwritten census forms using intelligent automation. Each census form contained individual lives captured at a defining moment in Irish history."
Kevin Young, Project Lead, Deloitte Ireland
Imagine carefully archived paper census forms, filled with details of a population finding its feet in the earliest years of the Irish State. This is the National Archives where every document contains a small piece of our national story.
Now imagine a second-generation grandmother in a suburb of Boston tracing her own grandparent’s address in Cork at the click of a button on her smartphone. Or imagine a family discovering an ancestor’s occupation or household details from a century ago on a laptop at their kitchen table.
This is the impact of what the National Archives and Deloitte have now achieved together through the transcription of the 1926 Census – an ambitious cultural heritage transformation project undertaken by the National Archives. The original Census consisted of 1.5 million handwritten forms, completed in the aftermath of revolution, civil war and a pandemic, capturing a newly independent Irish Free state with a population of approximately 2.9 million people.
Turning those documents into a fully searchable digital archive was not simply a matter of scanning paper. The records varied enormously in the cursive handwriting style of the day, while some of the century-old pages required careful preservation by the National Archives throughout the process.
Kevin Young, who led the project at Deloitte, said the emotional weight of the work was apparent from the beginning. “When you saw the physical archives, you could immediately feel the responsibility and potential of it. The documents are physically impressive, but our team was very aware that they were also individual lives, households and communities captured at a defining moment in Irish history. The challenge was how to use technology in a way that respected that history while making it searchable and accessible for future generations.”
To tackle the challenge, the National Archives and Deloitte combined robotic process automation, machine learning, and rigorous human quality assurance, helping to transform unique historical documents into a searchable digital archive for our future.
The result was the saving of an estimated 23,703 hours of manual processing work and for the National Archives the creation of a high-fidelity digital archive that is now freely accessible to people all over the world.
The technology and automation framework we built with the National Archives has also created a blueprint that can be replicated across cultural heritage projects, public sector transcription and large-scale enterprise document processing.
Kevin Young, Project Lead, Deloitte Ireland
“It showed that even highly complex handwritten archives can be transformed into living digital resources when the right expertise and technology are brought together. This project is a great example of how technology can be applied beyond efficiency, but for public value, preserving something deeply human.
“This is one of the most important records of modern Irish history and helps society understand where it has come from and shape where it goes next,” explains Orlaith McBride from the National Archives. “This project has unlocked millions of individual stories and working with the team at Deloitte brought the care and expertise needed to deliver this invaluable resource.”
