Alabama Voting Records

Yearly voting registers list the persons who were eligible to vote. Male citizens over the age of 21 were eligible to vote. Women will be listed only after 1920. County registers may be available from about 1900. For immigrants, the records sometimes mention the date and court of naturalization. They are arranged by precinct and are not alphabetical. They give the person’s name, age, precinct, post office, and date of birth and include the years the poll tax was paid. Sometimes the record may indicate "deceased," "moved," "gone," or "out of county." The Family History Library has microfilms of many of these county records, sometimes to the 1940s. For example:

Alabama. Probate Court (De Kalb County). Alphabetical List of Registered Voters, 1902–1930. Salt Lake City, Utah: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1990. (Family History Library .) These records are arranged by year, location, and then surname. They include the name of the voter, and usually the age, precinct or ward, and post office. Beginning in 1908, the records usually give the exact date of birth.

To locate voter registers, search for the specific county using the http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library/fhlcatalog/supermainframeset.asp?display=localitysearch&columns=*,0,0 Place Search of the Family History Library Catalog.

The Alabama Department of Archives &amp; History created an 1867 Voter Registration Database on-line. Currently all entries for Wilcox, Winston, Walker, Tuscaloosa, Tallapoosa, Talladega, Sumter, St. Clair, Shelby, Russell, Pike, Pickens, Perry, Morgan, Montgomery, Mobile, Marshall, Marengo, Madison, Macon, Lawrence, Lee, Jackson, Jefferson, Jones (now Lamar), Henry, Greene, Fayette, Franklin, Elmore, Etowah, Dale, Dallas, DeKalb, Crenshaw, Conecuh, Covington, Coosa, Colbert, Cleburne and Blaine Counties are available.

The books for the following counties were severely damaged from mold: Dallas; Franklin; Lauderdale; Limestone; Lowndes; Monroe; Randolph; and Washington. Some information may be missing due to the extent of the mold damage.

The volumes are significant genealogical records as this is one of the first statewide government documents that record African-American males living in Alabama. Because no index existed for individual volumes or for the records as a whole, and because of the deteriorating condition of the records, in 2004 ADAH staff began scanning the documents and keying the data from each entry into a computer database. When a successful search retrieves a name from the database, an image of the page where the entry resides will also be available for your use.