New York State granted women the right to vote on November 6, 1917. Women were soon allowed to show up in person to add their names to the list of voter registrations all around the state.
Ancestry.com has released a new database of digitized voter registration ledgers from Manhattan. TY to the sharp-eyed folks on the New York City Genealogy FB page for pointing this out!
For International Women's Day and Women's History Month, I prioritized looking for my female ancestors who lived in Manhattan during the period covered by this new database (1915-56).
Women registered in 1918
I was happy to see that some of my female ancestors in New York City showed up to register the first time they were legally permitted to do so.
The image at top shows how many people in all were added to the registration ledger for a particular election district over a two-day period in February 1918, counting my female ancestors too. Yet the ledger was officially known as the 1917 voter registration list. Hold that thought.
Let me say that I'm very proud of the women who registered in February, 1918 so they could vote for the first time in a New York special election held during March, 1918.
Check the source carefully
This is also a reminder to check into each source carefully. As I said, this particular voter registration ledger was titled 1917 and correctly transcribed that way by Ancestry.
However, as shown in the excerpt at the top and on individual pages of the scanned ledgers in database, women (including my female ancestors) who registered in 1918 were added to the 1917 listing.
The lower part of the summary of registered voters notes that as of May 1918, 140 women registered to vote in this specific election district.
So I would indicate 1918 as the date of my female ancestors' voter registrations, despite the official name of the ledger being the 1917 voter registration list.
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