30 June 2025, in the 103rd anniversary of the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI), the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) project, led by Trinity College Dublin, opened access to 175,000 historical documents.
The digital publication includes restored materials lost in the 1922 fire, including chancery records, wills, parish registers, and census records, spanning approximately 700 years of Irish history.
Special attention is given to the 19th-century censuses, most of which were lost. For the first time, four volumes of the 1821 census, including complete data for the Aran Islands, have become publicly available.
Thanks to the efforts of researcher Brian Gurrin, approximately 60,000 names have been recovered. Previously only available on microfilm, the data is now digitized and accessible on the population portal.
The project has garnered international attention: tens of millions of descendants of Irish emigrants worldwide are using the new digital resources to research their family history.