~ In 1920, the 19th Amendment was passed, granting women the right to vote. This monumental event was marked by over 50,000 Boston women registering to vote. The Boston City Archives now holds these records, which document women's names, addresses, places of birth and occupations. In some cases, additional information about their naturalization process is also included.

The Mary Eliza Project has taken on the task of transcribing these valuable handwritten records into an easily searchable and sortable dataset. Recently, they have finished transcribing the Ward 16 registers and added them to their dataset.

Ward 16 covered a large part of Boston's Roxbury neighborhood in 1920 and ran from Blue Hill Avenue to Walnut and Washington Streets. Over 200 of Ward 16's new voters had birthplaces located in present-day Eastern Europe, pointing to the thriving Jewish community in Roxbury at the time. Congregation Adath Jeshurun on Blue Hill Avenue was a popular synagogue for this community and attracted many new families and individuals to the area.

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Annie Stone was one of Ward 16's new voters who made history as Boston's oldest woman voter at 102 years old! She registered to vote two days after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and even made a special hat for the occasion when she cast her ballot for Calvin Coolidge. The Boston Globe sent a reporter to interview her about her plans for voting in her first federal election and found that she had been keeping up with political news every morning despite her failing eyesight.

Annie Stone's story is only one of many that can be found in this new addition to the Mary Eliza Project dataset. With this data now available online, anyone can explore these records and uncover more stories like Annie Stone's that are hidden within them.

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