On Saturday, Sept. 30 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. community members are invited to join members of the Mary Eliza Project at the Lower Mills Branch of the Boston Public Library to learn about the ongoing transcription of general registers of women voters in Boston in 1920.

The Mary Eliza Project began in 2021 as a collaboration between the Boston City Archives and Simmons University. The project is currently supported by a grant from the Community Preservation Act, which will end in April and is overseen by the Boston City Archives.

Over the past two years, the project team has worked on transcribing the handwritten columns of general registers of women voters from the City of Boston into a searchable online dataset.

“These records are public records, they're records that everyone in and outside of Boston should have access to,” said Marta Crilly, the Mary Eliza Project’s co-director. “Right now, you can come into the city archives and look at them but they're really difficult and time-consuming to use because they're handwritten and there are a lot of barriers. So, something we really wanted to do with this project is make it accessible for everyone because we think that this is a really important piece of Boston's history.”

Crilly, who is also an archivist for reference and outreach at the City of Boston, believes the database can teach the public many things such as the ongoings of women, civic engagement, and newly arriving immigrant groups in Boston in 1920.

“We have found a lot of women in these registers break outside of the bounds of what you would expect from a woman in 1920,” Crilly said. “Something that I personally have taken away from this is that there's a lot to explore in these records. These records show us that the way we imagine that women lived in the past is not always correct.”

The dataset, which can be accessed by the public as a searchable Excel spreadsheet, includes information about the registered women including their name, address, place of birth, occupation, place of work, naturalization information, and closest male relative. Until transcriptions are fully complete this spring, the database will be updated periodically.

Erin Wiebe is one of six transcribers for the Mary Eliza Project. Wiebe began working on this project as a graduate student at Simmons University in 2021. She now is a contractor for the project through the Boston City Archives and their Community Preservation Act grant.

In an interview, Wiebe explained that handwritten register books are formatted similarly to a spreadsheet and read left to right. Although this makes the transcription process easier, the task does not come without challenges such as illegible handwriting and misspellings. Wiebe and the other transcribers work together to translate as much information onto the digital sheet as possible but sometimes must turn toward the public for help. Crilly said that the team has even utilized social media to do so.

“We have crowdsourced before, using Twitter and Facebook, where we'll put up the handwriting and say, ‘Can someone help us figure this out?’ and sometimes people who are native speakers of that language will be able to recognize something where they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that clerk is phonetically writing this name,’” Crilly said.

In acquiring information about each registered woman, both Crilly and Wiebe hope to share the stories of those who have been overlooked in the past.

“A lot of the popular narratives of women's suffrage in America are focused on a few certain political leaders, most often the white and more affluent women that we hear about. But this project is a way to reveal the stories of black, immigrant, and working-class women who were registering right alongside those more well-known women and who also deserve to be called suffragists,” said Wiebe.

Focusing on these other women, allows Wiebe and her team to better explain the limitations of the 19th Amendment.

“The 19th Amendment was very important for women's suffrage, but it was more of a turning point and not an endpoint. There were still women left out when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it didn't automatically enable every woman in the country to access the ballot,” Wiebe said. “We have seen in Boston from these transcriptions that many black women were registering to vote. But in other parts of the country, it was much more difficult.”

On Saturday, Mary Eliza Project members will bring records, specifically those focusing on Dorchester, to Lower Mills. Here guests will have the opportunity to hear the stories of Dorchester women and learn about the project as well as how to access the database and conduct research. Saturday’s speakers will include one of the project's leaders Dr. Laura Prieto, transcriber Anna Boyles, archivist Laura Kitchings, and Marta Crilly.

“I hope that they feel empowered to use the data set to do their own research. We really wanted to make this easy to use. We really want to provide equitable access to these records,” said Crilly. “Part of our presentation will be teaching folks how to use the data set and what we really hope is that folks will feel empowered to use the dataset to do their own research and uncover stories.”