Monday 26 January 2015

Absent Voters in St Mary's Parish 1918

Streets in St Mary's parish from a 1949 map (click to enlarge)
The War Memorial in St Mary's Church lists 197 men and one woman who lost their lives in the First World War.  Within the boundaries of the parish - the oldest in Barnsley - are many non-conformist churches and chapels which also contain war memorials and rolls of honour.  Please refer to our index page for a full list of these.

We are very lucky that in Barnsley there survives a list of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and nurses who were serving abroad in late 1917, early 1918 in the form of the 1918 Absent Voters' List.  This was compiled following the changes in electoral franchise extending the vote to all men over 21 and to women over 30 who fulfilled certain property requirements.  So all servicemen who were over 21 or who would be 21 by the forthcoming General Election in 1918 were registered to vote.

The Absent Voters tab above will return you to the index page for these lists which contains more information.

The sections of the list are in a downloadable.pdf file and each file contains around 250-300 names. Due to the mismatch between Polling Districts and parish boundaries only streets in the area of St Mary's parish (see map above) have been transcribed.  Other streets and parts of streets will be transcribed as part of neighbouring parishes.

Pt.1 Polling Districts pt 1A, pt 2B, 3C
Pt.2 Polling District 4D
Pt 3 Polling Districts pt 11M, pt 13P
Pt 4 Polling Districts pt 14Q, pt 15R

These pages have been transcribed by our volunteers and all mistakes are our own.  Please let us know if you spot anything glaringly wrong and we will make ever effort to correct it.  Note that abbreviations and spellings are transcribed as seen.

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