England Modern Electoral Records (National Institute)

Recent Electoral Registers
Since 2002 there have been restrictions on access to electoral rolls less than 30 years old, and two separate versions:


 * A full version kept by theElectoral Registration Officer and used only for electoral purposes and by the police.


 * An edited version for any other use (such as direct mail and genealogy) where voters may choose to be omitted (Hawgood’s Two Electoral Registers. Journal of One-Name Studies Vol. 7 #12, page 25 and Stockdill’s New System is a Bad Idea!. Journal of One-Name Studies Vol. 7 #12, page 25). Let us hope that by the time our descendants need to use them the full versions will be open to public scrutiny.

The current (edited) electoral roll is online at 192.com for a fee. It contains names, addresses and telephone numbers (unless ex-directory) and is also available on CD. Modern electoral registers are known to have some duplicates—people listed twice with the same address but different postcodes.

Read more about electoral registers in Gibson and Rogers’s Electoral Registers Since 1832; and Burgess Rolls (1990) who also have a good section on sources of inaccuracies in electoral registers; Harvey (Telephones, Ratepayers and Buff Books. Some 19th and 20th century Sources at Guildhall Library. Genealogists’ Magazine Vol. 25 #5, page 177-180, 1996) especially for the extra registers for the City of London; Herber (Ancestral Trails, 2003) and Wood (Did Your Ancestor Vote? Family Tree Magazine Vol. 13 #2, page 55-57, 1996). Weeds (Election Fever. Practical Family History #25, page 16-18, 2000) conjures up the real flavour of the pre-1832 elections, illustrated with Hogarth’s series of election paintings.

National Registration Scheme 1915
There was a World War I Adult National Registration Scheme in 1915 which, had it survived, would have made a most useful census. However, only the records for Yeovil, Somerset, and Barrowford, Lancashire seem to be extant (Tom Wood 2002).

Other Political Election Records
There are plenty of other records kept by political parties around election times, for example (Healey):


 * Accounts.
 * Annotated copies of electoral registers.
 * Correspondence.
 * Ex-servicemen willing to act as Special Constables on polling day.
 * Invitation lists.
 * Lists related to the need to capture women’s votes in 1928.
 * Members and subscriptions paid.
 * Minute books.
 * Names and addresses of people willing to help with canvassing, office work, driving a car on polling day etc. There is a nice story of my maternal grandmother requesting from the Conservatives a ride to the polling station. When they turned up at her house they found it was the headquarters of the local Labour Party, as my grandfather was a staunch and active organizer. I bet there was a bit of muttering going on!
 * Organizers of fundraising events.
 * Party officials at county and district levels.
 * Possible defectors.
 * Those present at meetings.

It is a mistake to dismiss pre-1928 electoral registers of various kinds as containing too few people in too high an economic level to be worth the researcher’s time. Even if your ancestor couldn’t vote, maybe someone else in the family could—a brother, father, husband, uncle or in-law, perhaps. However, the touted value of electoral lists to provide at least the geographic areas where the surname occurs is really only useful if indexes are available. Census indexes for the period 1841-1901 are now more easily available than electoral lists, but the latter are valuable for geographic location of the surname prior to and after this time.

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Information in this Wiki page is excerpted from the online course English: Taxes, Lists, Business, Electoral and Insurance Records offered by The National Institute for Genealogical Studies. To learn more about this course or other courses available from the Institute, see our website. We can be contacted at [mailto:wiki@genealogicalstudies.com wiki@genealogicalstudies.com]

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