NZ electoral rolls – tips and tricks!

So, why are electoral rolls such a big deal for NZ family history, anyway? The answer is that we don’t have the personal information from the NZ census of past decades such as exists for England and some other countries. So electoral rolls are one of the sources that we use as a substitute. Through them, we can find the living place and (often) occupation of ancestors who qualified to vote. However, that’s also where things get a little complicated, because the rules about who could vote have evolved over the decades since the 19th Century and the changes affect which ancestors appear on rolls and which do not.

To help with this problem, the Auckland Libraries website has a NZ Voting Rights Timeline of important dates when rule changes were made about the eligibility to vote. Some like 1879 (male franchise) and 1893 (women’s franchise) have a very big impact. Others (like changes over time about the age at which people could vote) are more subtle, but still important.

Lady voters going up to polling-booth, election day, Auckland, 1899. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 7-A12353

The NZ Electoral Commission’s website also has a section called The History of the Vote which I recommend  to researchers wanting more historical background. It offers some interesting snippets of social history – such as an account of drunkenness and corruption in Auckland elections of the 1850s, including tampering with the electoral rolls!

NZ electoral rolls 1853 to 1981 are now digitized and available through Ancestry.com. This database may be accessed through the Auckland Libraries website on library premises for free. (It is not available through the website from home computers.)  NOTE: scroll to the bottom of the page of the NZ electoral roll database and you will find a detailed list of the election years covered. Those (few) without an asterisk beside the year are not yet searchable by voter name, but only browsable.


New Zealand Electoral Roll for Geraldine District, 1876.

For the years after 1981, come into the Auckland Research Centre on level 2 of the Auckland Libraries building in Lorne Street, in central Auckland. We hold a full set either on microfiche or hard copy that continues to the current – 2013 year.

Janelle

There are certain records such as UK census records that are frequently consulted for doing family history research. Unfortunately, no such records exist for New Zealand so we have to rely on other records to find information about households - two popular alternative sources are the Wise’s Directory and of course, the NZ Electoral Rolls.

One our customer’s who regularly searches Papers Past for historical information about Auckland
came across a news item in the 9 February 1883 edition of the New Zealand Herald reporting on a City Council meeting which offers insight as how these records were introduced into the library's collection.

Check back later this week for a new blog post from Janelle with some tips and tricks on the NZ electoral rolls.

Karen

As mentioned in my 18 December blog about searching for passenger lists, particularly for those of us with ancestors who arrived through the port of Auckland, things are looking up!

Landing passengers, c.1910. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19100721-3-1

There is another online source which might help. The free website offered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints now includes NZ passenger lists digitised from microfilms held by Archives New Zealand. An online name index is gradually being built up by volunteers (they still want help if you feel like joining in) and is worth checking. If you don't get a hit on the family name, there is an alternative, but be warned it is not a quick fix.

It is possible to browse through the more than 350,000 images of ship passenger lists for the period approximately 1855 to 1973. Now, I am not suggesting this for someone who hasn’t a clue on what ship or in which year their ancestor came into Auckland. However, if you have got a hit in either the Auckland Area Passenger Arrivals Index, or the online newspapers' shipping news, which means you have a ship name and date of arrival, then the task, although onerous, is possible!

The images of passenger lists are arranged by port and year, with different sequences for Auckland. For instance there is 'Auckland',  'Auckland (inwards)',  'Auckland (other ports also listed)', 'Auckland and Hawkes Bay' and so on. Each of these categories needs to be checked in turn to see if they cover the year in which you are interested. Where that year is listed you need to check through the listings of that year to see if your ship name appears. Where it does, scrolling through the images will reveal the original record and date of the passenger list(s). But be warned. Some vessels, particularly Trans-Tasman ones, made multiple trips into Auckland in the same calendar year so care is needed to check you get the right date of arrival.

So what do you get as the reward for all this effort, I hear you wondering?

Image from NZ, Immigration Passenger Lists, familysearch.org

Well, the results are variable. Some passenger lists are hardly more useful than the brief stuff in the papers, but others yield details such as ages of passengers and ethnicity. Some include occupation and (at least by the 20th century) some give a basic address from their place of origin.

The results may be rewarding or disappointing, but that is the essence of all family history research, is it not?

Good luck!

Janelle

Oh, and I should add, these search strategies and techniques work for other ports as well. For a discussion about finding passenger lists and some of the online sources that exist for other NZ ports, see my blog post from 25 May 2011.