Census Address Search

Census Address Search tool, for search 1901/1911 returns by address...

The NAI search engine is primarily designed for searching by names of individuals, but not so good when it comes to finding addresses. E.g. a search for townland/street named 'Sackville' give 1,332 results around Ireland, narrowing down to Dublin gives 1,150.

The census address search returns just the townland/street details and gives a much more manageable 25 results for the 'Sackville' search, and just 8 for Dublin in 1911, with links to the location browse and search functions on the NAI website.


This search also allows full wildcard and soundex searches and in addition allows filtering results by year and county and also an optional DED wildcard field.

The place-names have been categorised, so the address type and sub-type or qualifier are split into separate fields so the initial search can concentrate on the primary name. e.g. for the street listed as “Lr. Sackville Street” 'Sackville' is considered the primary name, 'Street' is the location type, and 'Lr./Lower' is the qualifier or sub-type. The address type or subtype can be filtered in a search using the 'additional' search field – e.g. to see which DEDs South Gt. Georges St in Dublin is located :


The categorise process was run using a very simple set of rules, so there may be some failures..the process is still being fine tuned. The initial UI is very basic for the moment while a further process is ongoing to cross link the census data with the townland database, with the aim of possibly providing civil parish and barony data, and also as a placename check to find typos in the townlands in the NAI census transcripts.