Take one evening and a new online resource and pretty soon the evening is gone. This past Wednesday, Ancestry.com posted indexing and images of the printed lists of registered voters from 1900-1944, with a scattered number into the 1960s. I lived in California in 1967 but did not register to vote in the short time I was there. I began to write this blog post, but got quite waylaid using the Voters lists, so am finishing my posting two days later!
I found my cousins, granduncles and grandaunts, and some paternal relatives of my children. In light of the current overload of political campaigning, I was fascinated to see the declared political party designations which provided a few surprises. The lists give the voter’s name, age, address, occupation, and the politicial affiliation. Searching is done by name and a county can be specified. One name I searched is quite uncommon so I searched only by the surname.
I found the lists helpful in looking for some Los Angeles area relatives. City directories are quite sparse after the 1930s and by the 1950s and 60s the regular directories were not published for L.A. I was searching for more info on relatives in the later time period. I did find a few clues to use in searching for possible living relatives.
For more details on the origin of these lists that were published every two years, visit Ancestry.com. The description includes a list of what years are available for a given county. Be sure to be flexible in your searches. And for some years in a given county you may have to check several lists to find the surname and then the correct relative.
© 2008, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.
