Find your ancestors in Australia electoral rolls

What can these records tell me?

This collection comprises transcripts and images of electoral rolls from Australia; at present, the collection includes records from the following states and territories:

• New South Wales (state electoral rolls for the years 1903 and 1913 and commonwealth electoral rolls for 1935) – 100% have images
• Northern Territory (for the years 1895, 1906, 1922, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1934, 1937, and 1940) – 0% have images
• Western Australia (commonwealth electoral rolls for the years 1939, 1943, and 1949) – 100% have images
• Queensland (for the years 1860-1884 and 1895-1915 for state electoral records and 1903, 1906, 1913, 1922, 1934, 1941, 1949, and 1959 for commonwealth electoral rolls) – 45% have images
• Tasmania (commonwealth electoral rolls for the years 1916, 1934, and 1943) – 66% have images
• South Australia (commonwealth electoral rolls for the years 1939, 1941, and 1943) – 100% have images

Each contains thousands of names of those who were living in that state at the time and were eligible to vote. Women are included in these rolls; women received the right to vote in the Commonwealth of Australia in 1902. Prior to that, South Australia had enfranchised women in 1895 and in Western Australia in 1899. Australia was the second country in the world to grant the vote to women.

Additional transcripts from other states and territories will be added as we acquire them. We currently have Victoria electoral rolls as a browse-only set, which can be found in the Useful links and resources section. In that section, you will also find links to the browse-only versions of the state electoral rolls where you can browse the high-quality scanned images of the original electoral rolls.

Electoral rolls can provide you with significant information for your family research. Most transcripts will contain a combination of the following fields:

• First name(s)
• Last name
• Sex
• Birth year
• Occupation
• Year
• Number
• House name
• Street
• Address
• Place
• Sub-district
• District
• State
• Country
• Page

From the search screen, you can search by name, birth year, event year, occupation, place, street, sub-district, district, state, and other household member. You can also search by address alone, using the Address tab at the top of the search screen. The address search is most useful when you have a specific street name you’d like to search by. Scroll down to Search tips to learn more about how to use these search tools.