How to research a house in Dublin
The free 1901 and 1911 censuses — a model of open data — Griffith's Valuation, the Tithe Applotment Books, the Registry of Deeds, and the records lost in the 1922 Public Record Office fire: a guide to tracing a Dublin house against the grain of Irish archival loss.
By The Plot Team · May 27, 2026 · 4 min read
Irish house history is shaped by a catastrophe and a gift. The catastrophe is the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin's Four Courts, which destroyed centuries of records at the opening of the Civil War, including most of the 19th-century censuses. The gift is that the survivors — and the records rebuilt or kept elsewhere — are unusually free and open, more so than almost anywhere in Europe. Researching a Dublin house means knowing exactly which of these you're dealing with. Here is the path.
The crown jewels: the 1901 and 1911 censuses
The 1901 and 1911 censuses of Ireland are fully digitised, fully indexed, and completely free at the National Archives of Ireland (census.nationalarchives.ie). They are a model of what open public data can be — and they are precious precisely because the censuses of 1821 through 1891 were destroyed (1821–51 in the 1922 fire, 1861–91 deliberately pulped during the First World War).
Search by surname, by townland, or by street and house number — for a Dublin address this is the single best starting point. Each household form names everyone present with age, occupation, religion, literacy, and birthplace, and the 1911 return even records years of marriage and number of children. You can often see the same family in both years, the household growing or thinning across the decade. (Plot attempts this record for Irish addresses, and points you straight to the free National Archives search — the public interface is a search form rather than a clean data feed, so it's the one source you'll usually open yourself.)
Before the census: Griffith's Valuation
For the mid-19th century, the essential property record is Griffith's Valuation (Richard Griffith's Primary Valuation of Tenements), carried out 1847–1864 to assess rateable property across Ireland. It lists the occupier and the immediate lessor of every holding, with the valuation, indexed by townland and (in cities) by street. It's free at askaboutireland.ie. For Famine-era Ireland, when the censuses are gone, Griffith's is the closest thing to a national snapshot of who held what — and for a Dublin house it can name the occupier and landlord around mid-century.
Earlier still: the Tithe Applotment Books
Going back further, the Tithe Applotment Books (1823–1837) recorded occupiers of agricultural land liable for the tithe to the Church of Ireland. They're free at the National Archives (census.nationalarchives.ie). They cover land more than townhouses, so they're more useful for a Dublin house on the then-rural edge than for the Georgian core — but they're a genuine pre-Famine name record, and free.
Ownership: the Registry of Deeds
Ireland's Registry of Deeds, established in 1708 and still operating from Henrietta Street in Dublin, registered memorials of deeds, mortgages, and marriage settlements for over three centuries — and crucially, it did not burn in 1922. Its records are consulted on site (with some indexes digitised), organised by grantor name and by place through the lot/townland indexes. It is not a free online deed feed, but for a property that changed hands by registered deed it can carry the ownership trail back into the 1700s — a rare survival in the Irish record.
Maps and the city's fabric
The Ordnance Survey Ireland historic maps (the 6-inch and 25-inch series from the 1830s onward) are viewable free through the OSI/Tailte Éireann historic map viewer and let you watch Dublin's streets and suburbs take shape. Valuation Office maps tie Griffith's holdings to specific plots. For the Georgian and Victorian architecture itself, the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (buildingsofireland.ie) describes and rates buildings street by street, free.
What was lost — and named honestly
It's worth stating plainly: the 1922 Public Record Office fire destroyed wills, the pre-1901 censuses, and centuries of state and court records. The remarkable Beyond 2022 / Virtual Record Treasury project has digitally reconstructed a great deal from copies and abstracts held elsewhere, and it's free to search — a genuinely moving piece of archival recovery. When your Dublin research hits a wall in the 19th century, the fire is usually the reason, and the Virtual Record Treasury is increasingly the way around it.
How Plot helps in Dublin
For a Dublin address, Plot builds a real page: it geocodes the address, attempts the free 1901/1911 census and routes you to the National Archives search, surfaces heritage records through the cross-referenced public layer (Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, with Irish architectural-heritage entries), and gathers Wikimedia imagery. It's honest that Ireland's newspapers sit behind paid archives and that Griffith's, the Tithe Books, and the Registry of Deeds are free or on-site indexes you'll often open yourself — but it assembles the open layer and shows you exactly where the deeper, hand-led research begins.