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Monday, November 7, 2016

Reclaim the Records frees the List of Registered Voters for New York City for the year 1924


Reclaim the Records has just announced another amazing project. Reclaim the Records us a not-for-profit group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates who are filing Freedom of Information requests to get public data released back into the public domain. They are collecting information about archivally important data sets that are not available online or on microfilm, and then they are using the Freedom of Information laws and Open Data initiatives to get copies of this information released back to the public.

I am tempted to quote their entire explanation of their efforts and the content of the List of Registered Voters for New York City for the year 1924. This resource contains hundreds of thousands of names and perhaps over a million names of the registered voters in New York City. Here is a quote explaining the list:
This list of names is exactly what it sounds like, a list of everyone in New York City who was legally registered to vote in the 1924 election. It was originally compiled by the New York City Board of Elections and printed in the City Record, a daily government publication. That means that this kind of registered voters list isn't under copyright and is potentially available under state Freedom of Information laws -- which is exactly the kind of thing we like to acquire and publish. 
The list is broken down by the five boroughs (counties) of New York City, and then each borough is broken down by their Assembly Districts. Here are the links to these newly online publications at the Internet Archive:
And then within each of those Assembly Districts (A.D.), the list is further broken down into Election Districts (E.D.) and then by street addresses. 
Each one of these new documents is a series of high quality images or PDF's that you can flip through like a book, zoom in close, or even download for offline use.
These lists are all in the Internet Archive and can be searched word by word or downloaded for further use off line.  Here is a screenshot from the Internet Archive.


You can read the full account of how the records were obtained and how to use the records by clicking here.

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