Transcriptions of Secretary of State, Abstract of Voter Registrations Reported to the Military Government, 1868, Charleston County 

 

    More commonly known as the Charleston County 1868 Voter Registration Roll, this is part of a 31-volume series covering the entire state “originally created by the order of commander of the Second Military District in accord with 14 U.S. Stats. 429, 15 U.S. Stats. 2, and 15 U.S. Stats. 14, which gave him ultimate responsibility for the registration of voters and the conduct of elections.  The series was abstracted prior to 12 September 1868 from the series Voter Registrations Reported to the Military Government and was deposited with the secretary in October 1868.” 1  

     In the series are the names and race for each registered voter.  These would have been men only in 1868.  But those registered Charleston County voters would include the African American Freedmen, only three years after Emancipation.  The South Carolina record series was arranged by county, then by registration precinct, and lastly by polling or election precinct.  Within each election precinct the names are in rough alphabetical order, by only the first letter of the surname.  Whites and African Americans are listed in separate clusters.  In Charleston County there were nine registration precincts and thirty election precincts.  In 1868, this would have included in addition to Charleston County, Berkeley County and part of Dorchester County.   Election precincts include Goose Creek, Summerville, Pineville, and St. Stephens. 

    These transcriptions for Charleston County are a small part of a much larger collaboration among a number of South Carolina institutions.  The original volumes are at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, which microfilmed the records in 1987.  The South Carolina State Library saw the value of making the records more widely available and promoted their digitization.  The University of South Carolina’s Digital Collections Department scanned the microfilm, creating the digital files. The SC State Library created the metadata describing each volume, enabling USC’s Digital Collections to make the records freely available online.   But the records weren’t searchable, because the original records were handwritten.  ORC (optical character recognition program), which can make a text file word searchable can function with printed or typewritten text but not with handwritten ones. This is where Richland County Public Library’s Walker Local and Family History Center headed by librarian Debbie Bloom came into the picture. They recruited librarians and volunteers across the state to take on the task of manually transcribing every page of the massive document. The completed transcriptions are sent to the Walker Local and Family History Center to be collated and sent on to USC to be added to the digitized items online.  The end product will be an Abstract of Voter Registrations on the South Carolina Digital Library (scmemory.org) that will be fully searchable. 2 

    Marianne Cawley, manager of CCPL’s South Carolina Room and Charleston Archive, heard about the project and immediately wanted to participate.  The Charleston County records were over 300 pages of highly individualistic and quirky handwriting, creating challenges for the SC Room staff. On the South Carolina Digital Library you can see James Island interpreted as Pames Island. The staff utilized the original records available digitally on the South Carolina Digital Library and a template provided by the Walker Local and Family History Center. These transcriptions were created by SC Room staff: Marianne Cawley, Lish Thompson, Amanda Holling, Malcolm Hale, Sarah Murphy, Dot Glover, Charlotte Smith, with the assistance of College of Charleston interns John Bennett and Kayleigh Defenbaugh, CCPL Summer intern William Bailey-Hamiel, and volunteers Karolea Lucas and Barbara Collier. 

  1. White, Pamela. “From the Archive.” South Carolina Historical Magazine, January 1983,  Vol. 84, No. 1, page 53 “Abstracts of Voter Registrations Reported to the Military Government, 1868.” SC Arch Cat, http:// rediscov.sc.gov/scar/default.asp?IDCFile=details.idc.SPECIFIC=8985, DATABASE+SERIES, Assessed 27 August 2020. 

  2. Quirk, John. “A Team Effort.” Digital Collection, University of South Carolina Libraries, 9 April 2019, https://digital.library.sc.edu/a-team-effort. Accessed 27 August 2020 

August 28, 2020 

South Carolina Room & Charleston Archive 

 

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1868 Voter Rolls