Monday, November 7, 2016

Marguerite Hunter: A Registered Voter in 1912 (in California)

As I shared at Early 20th Century Hunter Sister Update, I found my great-grandparents, Percy and Marguerite Hunter, in a list of registered voters at an ancestry.com database: California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968. In 1912, Marguerite and Percy were registered Republican voters, living at 2510 Buena Vista. See the bottom two lines in the image below:

Ancestry.com; California Voter Registrations, 1900-1968; Original data: State of California, United States.
Great Register of Voters. Sacramento, California: California State Library. Year: 1912; Roll: 7; Berkeley Precinct 35.

I just read a post at the Searching for Stories blog where I learned that California women had only just gained the right to vote in a 1911 referendum. It's very likely that my great-grandmother Marguerite voted in the 1912 presidential election! (See 1912 California presidential election results at Wikipedia.)

Page 5 headline from GenealogyBank.com: San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1912

The family returned to Pittsburgh by the time of the printing of the 1913 Pittsburgh City Directory, and Marguerite lost the right to vote until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920.

Exercise your right to vote - 100 years ago in Pennsylvania, my great-grandmother, Marguerite Hunter, could not, after having been eligible to vote four years earlier in California.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your story. It must have been aggravating for your great-grandmother to lose a privilege based on her residence. I'm glad that we all have that right now. And thanks for the link to my blog.

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    1. It certainly would seem aggravating from our perspective, but perhaps she took it in stride, hoping that things were changing nationwide.

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