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.

Researchers examined census returns for Derry in 1831 and identified James Donnelly as the head of household 49 in the townland of Stramore in the parish of Ballynascreen.

Three unnamed women, most likely relatives, were living in the house at the time and the religion of all four was filed as Catholic.

The records show in 1839 James Donnelly married his neighbour, Ellen Hagan, and the ancestry continues in the parish until Dec’s mother, Annie Henry, married Alphonsus Donnelly in 1960.

There was no record of professions or information on those who might have died or emigrated in the previous 10 years, as happened in 1841 and 1851.

The documents are part of a massive tranche being made available by findmypast.com, Ireland’s National Archives, and the website familysearch.org.

Brian Donovan, of Find My Past, which has 20m registered users, said the 1831 census could yield treasures for the Donnelly family tree and hundreds of others.

“We would need to know these people are in the locality before we try and go looking for them, and we knew about Dec so we went looking for his past and this is what we discovered. The key thing is that this is one of the most unique insights into pre-famine Ireland — a world that was changed fundamentally.”