Other resources

This guide was last updated in 2009

Employment Records

For the lucky few of Dublin's tenement dwellers, a job with one of the few large employers of the city, like Jacobs Biscuit Factory or the Guinness Brewery, was enough to raise the family's standard of living.

Employment records can contain detailed personal information, including addresses, the name and occupation of the spouse, parent or guardian, date of birth and duration of employment. Employment records can be found by contacting the employer directly or through the National Archives.

Dublin Corporation Meetings and Reports

Dublin Corporation reports, particularly for the committees for health and housing, can give a detailed account of life in the slums and the proposed solutions to the overwhelming poverty. 

While these records do not usually name individual inhabitants they provide a sense of the scale of the destitution that the citizens were facing. The minutes of Dublin Corporation meetings are all housed in the Dublin City Library and Archive.

Darkest Dublin Collection

For a graphic illustration of life in the slums of Ireland's capital at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is worth looking at the photographs of the Darkest Dublin collection, housed at the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland.

The collection depicts men and women standing in the squalid streets and yards and children playing in the ruins of collapsed buildings and may depict the street your ancestors lived on. They are a dark and gloomy picture of the slums of Dublin city.