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November 27, 2008

Ontario Canada Voter's Lists 1867-1900 ONLINE

Ontario Voter's Lists 1867-1900 are now online, courtesy of Ancestry.com I took a few minutes to search them this morning for my own ancestors, and it's well worth having a look.

Some years have information - name of voter, residence, and whether the individual was an occupant, owner or tenant of the home he was in. Even though it may seem basic, it helps determine where and if an ancestor was living in those years.

Others have residence, description of voter (male or female), whether or not they are eligble as a juror and if they are eligible to vote in special elections or regular. some years include an occupation.

After confederation in 1867 the government began keeping registration lists of eligible voters. Some of the lists are separated according to who is eligible to vote at Municipal elections and who is eligible to vote at Legislative Assembly elections.

Ancestry.com description of this database staes "Women weren’t granted the right to vote until 1918, so there won’t be any women listed in these records." This is incorrect. For example a search using only the first name CATHERINE brought up 526 hits!

Voter registers are valuable records to use as census substitutes, since they will usually contain the names of heads of households and other adults. Because voter registers were published on a fairly consistent basis they are useful for tracking individuals over time and place.

Although the title of this database is ONTARIO Voter's List, I found over 500 names from Montreal Centre, Quebec in the 1867 lists.

So that makes even more reason to search Ontario Voter's Lists 1867-1900 - there ARE women on the list and there are names from Quebec as well as Ontario.

6 comments:

Janet Iles said...

Thanks for posting this. I just did a quick search for my Stiver connections and this will be helpful in tracking down some of the family members.

paperquilter said...

Thanks for the heads-up on this database; I've already found several relatives, including my 2nd and 3rd great-grandmothers, listed in their own names (both were widows at the time). Nice to find actual street addresses.

Unknown said...

I think you need the world subscription to see more than the name and year.

Unknown said...

I live in the US and you neglected to mention that I would need Ancestry World Deluxe in order to access this database.

Olive Tree Genealogy said...

Hi Bob

It's not a secret that Ancestry has different subscriptions - one is US Record Collection, the others are for "UK, Ireland, Canada and more" (plus USA of course).

Canada is not in USA so any database that relates to Canada would not be accessible from a US Record Collection subscription.

Unknown said...

Thanks for letting us know about this. I will now go in search of my Canadian ancestors to see if they're on there.
Karina.