Dublin City Electoral Rolls Digitised

The Dublin City Electoral Lists database was created as part of the Celtic Trí project, part-funded by the EU Interreg programme.

The 14 annual printed lists of electors surviving from 1937-1964 were scanned at high resolution, producing almost 49,000 scans, and then passed through an Optical Character Recognition process to produce a rough text version. These versions are being corrected and standardised, and added year by year to a database in the Reading Room of Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse St.

The full database will ultimately include 4.2 million records. At present, it holds 3.4 million records, covering the years from 1937 to 1957. An additional year 1956 to 1957 has just been uploaded to the database and is now available to view in the Reading Room.

In their original paper format, the lists were searchable by street only, this digitisation project has opened the search criteria and the database allows instant searches on first name, surname, street and house number, over the entire period or for single years. Wild card searching also allows researchers to capture surname, first name and street variant spellings

The database also includes compressed versions of the scanned pages, which can be magnified and browsed at will, allowing users to go directly from search results to an image of the original record. The original electoral rolls will continue to be held by Dublin City Archives.