It only took me five years

Way back in 2007 I took out a monthly subscription to Ancesty.com.au. I searched and downloaded feverishly for a month, then cancelled.

The collection I hit the hardest was the Australian Electoral Rolls. Now almost five years later I have finally made my way through all those pages I downloaded and entered them in my database.

My Family Historian plugin provided the final push I needed to get the job done. It made setting up the source records that little bit easier, so I could get on with concentrating on the information.

Information I have gained by entering the records in my database includes:

• Middle names I didn’t know before
• Clues as to birth, death and marriage dates
• Occupations, and occupation changes over time
• Addresses
• Names of people who are probably spouses or children of known relatives

It feels so good to have the backlog cleared! Of course, back in 2007 Ancestry only included electoral rolls up to 1936. Now, they have them up to 1980 – and I have an ongoing subscription. I might just have to search out some more electoral rolls entries…

Australian Federal Electoral Rolls – revisited

Back in February 2010 I was making heavy use of the Australian Electoral Rolls on Ancestry. Until you have slogged through polling place after polling place on microfiche, I don’t think you can appreciate how wonderful it is to be able to type in a name and see the person you’re looking for pop up in not only an unexpected polling place, but a different electorate.

You kids today have it so easy…

Expanded coverage

My use of the electoral rolls is likely to pick up again (not that I have finished entering all the data I downloaded last time!) now that Ancestry have expanded their coverage of Australian Electoral Rolls all the way up to 1980.

There’s something a little eerie about having the electoral rolls go so far. It’s in my lifetime! Although I was still a long way off voting, I have found my parents on the roll and it’s funny knowing that I was part of that household.

How old to vote?

The expansion of Ancestry’s holdings to 1980 raised a question for me. In what year was the voting age in Australia lowered from 21 to 18?

Unfortunately, the metadata on Ancestry is very poor. Changes to voting requirements and eligibility over time are skimmed over with the years that changes occurred mentioned in only vague terms. They don’t mention the voting age at all!

Fortunately, this lack of information had bothered me enough in 2010 that I sought out the answers myself and wrote about it in this blog:

Australian Federal Electoral Rolls - part 1
Australian Federal Electoral Rolls - part 2

Part one provides a summary of the information and a link to the Australian Electoral Commission's Australian Electoral History page. Part two describes how I was using the electoral roll at the time.

Referring back to my earlier posts, I see that the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1973. This means that I could use the electoral rolls to narrow down the birth year of people who born up to about 1962, who would first appear on the roll as 18 year olds in 1980.

Australian Federal Electoral Rolls - part 2

I recently described the Australian Electoral Rolls. I have used on them on microfilm, but for the last few years many of the rolls have been available - searchable and with images - on Ancestry.com.

The greater ease of access to the rolls has expanded the types of things I use them for.  While there are all the usual caveats about people who forgot to enrol, or update their enrollment etc they can be very useful for providing extra, unknown information, and narrowing down unknown dates.

• Birth date - people were supposed to enrol at 21, so find the earliest date they appear and subtract 21 years to get an indication of their birth date.
• Death date - when someone disappears from the roll it could indicate their death, especially if other family members remain.
• Marriage date and spouse - when a young man disappears from his parents house and appears at a new address, with a female of the same surname, there's a good chance he married her.
• Address - obviously.  
• Change of address - if the address changes, the person most probably moved to the new address before the date given. I attempted to use the electoral rolls to follow my ancestor Elizabeth French (nee Tregonning) around the country in the early 20th century but unfortunately her enrollment seems to be patchy once she started moving.
• Occupation - the electoral rolls include the person's occupation.
• Career progression - you can sometimes see how an individual progresses (or otherwise) in their career by the changes in the way their occupation was described, eg from clerk to accountant.

I recently used the rolls to sort out a collection of birth index entries that I suspected, but wasn't sure, were all children of the same family. I ducked into Ancestry and quickly found the children on the roll about 21 years after the birth index dates, all living at the same address. Since one of my concerns was that birth index locations jumped back and forth between two places, this gave me some confidence in the theory that they were all from the same family. Thinking to look at the electoral rolls was an "aha!" moment for me, and I felt very pleased with myself when it paid off!

Another thing that I have used the rolls for on microfilm, but I am reluctant to so in the digital version, is to flick through the pages of the polling place, looking for anyone else at the same address. Who else was living in my relatives houses, and how did they come to be there? Given the amount of time each page takes for me to download, and that the "Ls" alone in the last batch I looked at covered 10 pages, I think I'll be heading to the library if I get too curious about that.

Have you used the rolls? Can you think of other puzzles they might help solve now that they are more readily available?

Australian federal electoral rolls - part 1

One of my most used sources at the moment is the Australian federal electoral roll. I have used the electoral rolls in the past on microfiche at the National Library of Australia, but searching in that format was very time consuming. In the last few years, a selection of the rolls have become available to search or browse on Ancestry. It has changed the way I search in and use the electoral rolls, but I'll come to that in a future post.

I found the description of the rolls on the Ancestry website to be lacking, so I did a little digging.


Australian voting history, in brief 
The various colonies (now States and Territories) became what is now known as Australia at Federation in 1901. From 1902, both men and women aged from 21 were eligible to vote in federal elections. Enrollment to vote became compulsory in 1911, and actually casting a vote became compulsory in 1924. The voting age was reduced to 18 in 1973. Voting is still compulsory.

The history of the vote for indigenous Australians (and some other groups) is more complex than I feel able to cut down to a few lines. There's a lot of information linked from the Australian Electoral Commission's Australian Electoral History page (which is also my source for the above facts and figures).

Individual States of Australia passed the equivalent laws in respect to State elections at different times, some before Federation, some after. At various points in time there were people - women and indigenous people being the two most obvious groups - eligible to vote in some State elections but not Commonwealth elections, or vica versa.

Reading the rolls 
The rolls are arranged by electorate, then by polling place, then by surname. For each person on the roll the surname, first names, address, occupation and sex are shown. I'll talk more about how I have used the rolls and the information they contain in a future post.

One of the things I discovered while poking around the Electoral Commission site, is that people who were listed on the Commonwealth electoral roll because they were on a State roll, but were not eligible to vote in Commonwealth elections, were marked on the Commonwealth rolls with an "o". This sounded familiar to me, I was sure I had seen some of those "o"s, so I started hunting through my downloaded pages. The first instance I came across was this:

Australian federal electoral roll for Ferntree Gully, Flinders, Victoria, 1924

She's not a relative of mine, just on the same page as one. I checked at the end of the roll to see why Amy Augusta Robertson was not enrolled as a Commonwealth elector, but the way browsing works on Ancestry I couldn't find the right page.

Moving on, I came across a page with many "o"s, including my great-granduncle, Edwin Ernest Baker Lee:

Australian federal electoral roll for Flagstaff Gardens, Melbourne, Victoria, 1924

This time I did find the explanatory page.

Particulars regarding Electors enrolled on this Roll in virtue of a property qualification as Electors for the State Assembly.

Australian federal electoral roll for Flagstaff Gardens, Melbourne, Victoria, 1924

I thought that he must have been enrolled for the federal election at his home address, as he should have been eligible. He didn't come up at any other address in the search results, so I navigated to Caulfield myself. There I found his wife, but not him.

Australian federal electoral roll for Caulfield, Balaclava, Victoria, 1924

He was listed in the roll in each of the previous and subsequent years searchable on Ancestry so I suppose he must have failed to re-enrol in time at his new address when he moved sometime between 1919 and 1924.

Did this post help you? Can you add anything that would aid in understanding the rolls? 
If so, please leave a comment! If not, leave a comment and say Hi! anyway!

On the beach

Q: What does this beach have to do with my genealogy?


A: Nothing that I'm aware of.

It's Broulee Beach, New South Wales. I was there last week, on holiday.

During the day we did all the coastal holiday-type things you do with a 3 year old and a (nearly) 1 year old. We played on the beach, visited the zoo, found some playgrounds, wandered around the shops, and waited for hours in the ER because the baby had broken out in spots from head to toe...

In the evening, when the children were asleep, we quickly gave up on television and settled into other quiet activities.

I had my laptop, but only a very expensive pre-paid mobile internet connection. The internet famine turned out to be a good thing for my genealogy. Before I left home I installed Dropbox on both my desktop and laptop. I had been meaning to try Dropbox, and this was the perfect oppurtunity. Dropbox synchronises files between your computers and acts as an offsite backup. It has a few other claims, but the effortless file synchronisation was the feature of interest to me.

I was very pleased with how it worked. I made sure that I turned Dropbox file checking and synch off while I was away, so I wouldn't waste my limited internet connection. I turned the file sync back on again at home and my changes appeared on my desktop computer with no more effort by me. Easy.

The files I worked on were pages from the Australian Electoral Rolls, which I had downloaded from Ancestry two years ago. I had 107 pages, each with 1-5 people of interest. For each person the rolls give the name, address and occupation. As Australia had (and has) compulsory voting, they are very nice for following people's movements and career changes over time.

I made a start on the data entry back in 2007, but couldn't face doing the rest. While I was away, I managed to enter 3-4 pages each night. I still have 61 pages left to go, but the task doesn't seem quite so daunting. I just have to make sure I keep chipping away at it.

I'll talk more about how I'm using the Electoral Roll information another time.