Saturday morning last, at about half nine, I sat down in front of the laptop with the intention of scrolling the 1926 Census for twenty minutes over a cup of coffee. Four hours later, I rose from my seat, bleary-eyed, after a morning of wandering through the distant lives of family and strangers.

This is the thing nobody warns you about. They release the records, you go in looking for your own crowd, and four hours later you’re reading about a 58-year-old widow from a townland you’ve never heard of who was a hosiery knitter and whose lodger was a commercial traveller from Ennis.

The census dropped on Saturday morning, the first one taken by the Free State, and the National Archives have made it free to anyone with a pulse and a working broadband connection. Fair play to them. Eight people spent the equivalent of 1,526 days between them flattening the creases out of the pages and trying to decipher the handwriting, no mean feat.

I started my search on my own street in Marino, the first estate of its kind in the Free State which was only recently built. In fact, I wasn’t sure if our house was in situ yet but the records show eight people living here: two different families - Pillions and Conlons - and one Leo, the same name as our son. The head of the house was a watchman, recently invalided, and we were a little shocked to find the people originally came from Co. Offaly, not far from where my wife grew up. It’s a small world indeed.

The next was a short trip down the street to find a census record of my wife’s grandfather who was born and grew up on the road that joins ours, something we were completely unaware of when we bought the house. And there it was.

It was fascinating to move along the road, observing the small houses filled with people - usually eight to ten per household - and browsing through the different professions: seamstress, labourer, coalman, printer. Many of these families would have been the first to move out of the tenements in the city centre where they were piled into one room in squalid conditions. I was once told that when they moved out to Marino, the builders would write the names of the rooms on the doors, so unaccustomed were the new residents to all the new space.

And now there are four of us here, recently finished a kitchen extension and already looking to put on a garden room…

My exploration of my West Cork roots is still ongoing, a little trickier without house numbers but I did find my grandmother’s family in Dunowen: eight people in a two-room cottage, with more yet to be born. I’ll be digging further over the coming weeks.

There’s something so invigorating about trawling through history like this. As a kid, I got the bug when helping to research the St. James’ GAA and Ardfield-Rathbarry history 1892-1992. We spent many a long evening in the archives of The Southern Star poring over the records - Liam Evans, my father and a small team - stumbling across little nuggets from the past relating to the parish.

It’s so wonderful to see the same possibilities available now to any citizen with a curious mind.

Robot runs like lightning

Meanwhile, over in Beijing on Sunday, a Chinese-built humanoid robot called Lightning ran a half marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which is roughly seven minutes faster than the actual human world record. The robot is bright red, 169cm tall, built by a smartphone company, and has legs designed by engineers who studied elite human runners. Another robot faceplanted about two hundred feet from the starting line, got patched back together with packing tape, and continued.

Lightning itself crashed into a railing near the finish, was helped back up by technicians, and still won by a clear distance.

Team support staff followed the course in golf carts carrying stretchers and wheelchairs. Presumably, they had plenty of Deep Heat.

Jacob Kiplimo, the Ugandan who set the current world record a few weeks ago in Lisbon, was presumably sitting at home watching with a smoothie and considering alternative career options.

Fachtna’s take on it, delivered over a pint on Sunday evening after Cork beat Tipp by four points in Thurles, was that the rumours of our human demise have been greatly exaggerated.

“If they’d had a Lightning in at full-forward for Tipp,” he said, “they still wouldn’t have caught us.”

Lament to lamplighters

While scrolling through the census archives this weekend I was struck by how many of the professions are now defunct.

Lamplighters, umbrella fixers, blacksmiths, watchmen... Will some lad be thinking the same in a hundred years scrolling through our records? Podcaster. Intimacy coordinator. Brand ambassador. Crypto advisor. Or maybe in just ten years’ time?

With the robots now able to run better than us, do spreadsheets better than us, wage war and write poems, how quickly will our professions change in the years ahead? Maybe it’ll come full circle and we’ll all revert to jobs of old: a seamstress with an Etsy page, a watchman at the solar farm, and dare I say it, a newspaper columnist?