Try Electoral Registers

Many are now digitised, making them another useful census substitute

Electoral registers might not contain any biographical information, but interesting timelines can emerge if you make the effort to trace your family yearby-year, as comedian Alan Carr discovered when investigating his great grandfather’s life story. Only those people in the household who were eligible to vote will be listed, so you’ll often find parents living with grown-up children. The disappearance of a child from the list may indicate that they married and left the family home that year. The search for death records for people with common names can also be made easier by checking when they ceased to appear on the electoral roll. There is a good collection of electoral registers for Edinburgh, London, Swansea and other big cities and a handful of counties on ancestry.co.uk, many of which date from the early 19th century and up to the 1960s. Findmypast.co.uk has also digitised the British Library’s nationwide collection of electoral registers from 1832 to 1932.