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The British electoral roll - how useful is it for genealogy?
How information from the British electoral roll can be useful in the search for your family roots. How to search, how much does it cost and how can it help you discover more about your genealogy.
The need to find our roots...
Many cultures have traditions of recording their ancestry, some worship their ancestors and some build vast monuments to them. In the modern world, we are no longer so in touch with our past but the need to find out who we are and where we came from is still with us. Genealogy, or family history is one of the fastest growing hobbies in the developed world and many people find that, as they get older, they become more interested in finding out about their ancestry.
Genealogy and the internet
The internet is now playing a great part in that search. Many websites are now devoted to genealogy with people transcribing ancient records and making them available, either free, or through pay per view systems. The British Electoral Roll is a modern, up-to-date database of people in the UK who are eligible to vote in elections, but, surprisingly, it has become an important resource for people tracking their forebears.
Because so many people are tracing their family tree, making contact with other researchers who are investigating the same family lines can be very useful. Comparing notes and information with someone who is as interested in the same family as you is very exciting, and can lead to new information, new leads and new clues about where to focus your research next.
People researching the same family, but who descend down different lines may have family records such as wills, photographs, birth certificates that would be very useful to your own research and many people exchange information willingly.
Using the internet to find living relatives
Finding distant relatives who are researching the same family can, however, prove tricky. Many family history societies have surname interest lists that can provide good contacts, and some allied genealogy organisations keep county-wide surname interests in databases that are accessible through GENUKI. Another tack is to use either the telephone directory or the electoral roll to find people with the same surname and then contact them to see if they are connected with your family.
Less than 10 years ago, the electoral roll for the UK was not available on the internet - about 8 years ago, it started to appear on CD ROM for individual years, which provided a great searcheable record, with names and full postal addresses. Disks are still available but these are very expensive as they are marketed mainly to people who want to carry out bulk mailings for business purposes.
The UK electoral roll online
Several companies now offer the electoral roll online and update it at the beginning of each year. The 2008 electoral roll has been available since February 2008 and is now offered on a pay per view basis. Although the electoral roll was free to search some years ago, all the current sites charge some sort of fee but it is worth shopping around to find which one offers you personally the most cost effective deal. For people doing a lot of searching over a few months, a longer term package, for example, would turn out to be more cost effective than paying for single views, or for week or two at a time.
How electoral roll information is useful in genealogy
Once you have signed up and paid your fee, you can then start searching for the surnames you want, and collecting names and addresses of people with that surname in the areas of the UK that you think will be most useful. If you are looking for a fairly common surname, this could be a lot of work, many letters and a hefty postage bill, but it really can pay off if you have a fairly rare surname that you know is associated with a particular village or town.
In my own experience, using the electoral roll some years ago to contact people who had one surname in my family tree that was very rare proved an excellent strategy. I managed to make contact with a man in his 70s who turned out to be my second cousin. Another second cousin, who had died some years previously, had been interested in genealogy and had passed on all his information. Through this contact, made by an initial letter using the address obtained from the electoral roll, I was able to obtain copies of original parish register entries for this family going back to the 1700s.
Follow these links for more information about searching the 2007 electoral roll or the 2008 electoral roll.
Author
Kathryn Senior
Professional writer and genealogist based in East Yorkshire, UK
