Queensland Electoral rollsEdit This Page

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There are two kinds of electoral roll for Queensland:

• State electoral rolls, maintained by the Queensland Government
• Commonwealth electoral rolls, maintained by the Federal Government

In recent years, the Queensland Government stopped maintaining its own electoral rolls and handed responsibility over to the Australian Electoral Commission, who manage the Commonwealth electoral rolls. So now there is only one set of electoral rolls in contemporary Queensland.

Information in the Electoral Rolls

The information available in the electoral roll is typically:

• surname
• given names
• address
• occupation
• sex

Note that recently occupation and sex have been dropped from the electoral roll, so early rolls are more informative than later rolls.

Until recently (1990?) the electoral roll was organised by:

• electorate
• subdivision
• surname
• given names

This means that to find someone in the electoral roll, it helps a lot if you already know the electorate and sub-division. So if you have no clue where in Queensland the person was living, the process is a very tedious one of checking every electorate and every subdivision within the electorate. In this situation, it may be easier to use an index if one exists for that period.

More recently, the electoral rolls have been organised by:

• state
• surname
• given names

which makes finding a person very easy by comparison. So later rolls are easier to use, but have less information.

Inspecting the Queensland Electoral Roll

Places where you can view the historical electoral rolls for Queensland include:

• Queensland State Archives on microfilm
• National Archives of Australia on microfilm

Some genealogical societies hold partial collections of the historical electoral rolls:

• Genealogical Society of Queensland on microfiche and in books

The current electoral roll can be viewed at:

• some offices of the Australian Electoral Commission on microfiche
• state libraries, including Queensland State Library, on microfiche

Indexes to the Queensland Electoral Roll

Queensland Family History Society have transcribed the Queensland electoral rolls for 1903, 1913, 1922 and 1934 (with more in progress) and sell them as CD-ROMs. These CDs can be searched on any combination of fields with support for wildcards (handy when there are spelling variations). This means you can search by name for the person you want. Then having found their address, you can search for other people living at that address in the hope of locating other relatives at that address.

External Links

• This page was last modified on 14 September 2009, at 18:47.
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