Dec’s Derry ancestry traced back 180 years

A lost era of Irish census records could yield treasures for one half of Geordie double act Ant and Dec.

The ancestry of Declan Donnelly, whose parents moved to England fromDerry in the 1960s, has been traced back 180 years to his great-great-grandfather James Donnelly, who was living in a parish in the county with three women.

It was among 629,753 pre-1901 records released free to the public, and hadsurvived a bomb attack and fire at the onset of the Irish Civil War in 1922.