Women's History Month 2020: Not Everyone Voted: More Considerations

Schlesinger Library, Flickr the Commons

We've covered quite a bit this month and this week has been important because whether or not she had the right to vote and then could vote determines if you can find genealogically relevant records.

As we've explored this week  there are reasons why you might not find record of her voting. She may have had lost her citizenship as a result of her marriage. She may not have been able to pass the required literacy test. Paying a poll tax could have been beyond her means. She may have been denied the vote because she was living in a US territory or she was Native American. Native Americans were not granted citizenship until 1924 and then, according to the Library of Congress website, "it still took over forty years for all fifty states to allow Native Americans to vote. For example, Maine was one of the last states to comply with the Indian Citizenship Act, even though it had granted tax paying Native Americans the right to vote in its original 1819 state constitution...Even with the lawful right to vote in every state, Native Americans suffered from the same mechanisms and strategies, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation, that kept African Americans from exercising that right." [1]

Now even if she could vote and did vote, you still may not be able to access records. Not all voting registers are extant. That's why looking at poll tax records might be important. So it's important to do a thorough search of the catalogs for  FamilySearch, historical societies, and archives as well as digitized book websites Internet Archive, Google Books, and Hathi Trust. Don't forget to look at the FamilySearch Research Wiki to find articles on possible voting records. 

So as you start thinking about your female ancestors and their vote, consider their situation and where they lived. Then identify what records exist. 




[1] "Voting Records for Native Americans," Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/elections/voting-rights-native-americans.html: accessed 28 March 2020).