Irish Cause-of-Death Data, 1864–1921

Historical Irish cause-of-death data have been digitized to varying standards, and while digital copies can facilitate greater access they are not research ready. Having suffered enormous destruction over the centuries through fire and inadequate storage, Irish records are very fragmented in nature, and under-registration occurs within extant data because of poor state/subject relations and confessional differences. To reconcile absences and provide a fuller impression of historical cause-of-death, we contend that it is important to create life courses from all data types. This paper traces the development of Irish mortality data and discusses our efforts to render machine readable and interoperable data from death registration records and two decennial census datasets using innovative Low-Code/No-Code (LC/NC) solutions. Our methods and approaches will be particularly interesting to countries struggling to create Free, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data from legacy datasets that adopted a partial index linked to a PDF or Tiff of original handwritten sources.