Orlaith McBride

in Ireland in 1926 cannot be underestimated, you know, and I'm making no judgment in terms of how good, bad or indifferent they were, but the role of an institution was quite significant.

No, and I mean, to see that handwriting is just incredible.

As I said earlier, I couldn't find my own grandfather and then I did.

And it's the Cló Gaelach, so just to see the old Irish and from their perspective, it was about, you know, people describe themselves in very different ways.

But in many ways,

handwriting also can tell you so much about a person.

So obviously we have people who were illiterate who couldn't fill it out.

So you can see the X and then you can see very clearly that it's the handwriting of the guard.

You also then have

forms where the children are filling them out on behalf of the parents because the parents are illiterate but the children so you can see that it's a child's handwriting that's filling out the form so yeah just the forms themselves there's that emotional piece when you see it and you go oh my god that's my grandfather my great grandfather but then the handwriting itself so for example there's one

which isn't handwritten, we have one typed census return.

And that's from a large estate in the Midlands, I will say no more.

But that individual who was a man of means had his census return typed out.

And it was quite a large census return.

There's 10 lines in each return.

And his went on for a number of pages because obviously he had quite a large staff working for him.

So that's our only typed return.

In Portlaoise and in Mountjoy, they're just initialised.

And that is the same across various different institutions.

In some, for example, Grange Gorman Asylum, they're initialised.