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1836 Newfoundland general election

Election in Canada

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 28, 2026
Entity authorityQ7017953 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1836 Newfoundland general election was held from October 24 to November 15, 1836 in the Colony of Newfoundland. The Liberal reformers secured control of the government and defeated the governing Conservative party. However, the results of the election were later set aside by Chief Justice Henry John Boulton after he discovered some of the writs from the election had not been marked with the official seal. Some felt that this was a pretext used to justify holding another election because Liberal reformers had dominated the assembly.

Results

Results by district

† indicates that the incumbent did not run again.

‡ indicates that the incumbent ran in a different district.

$ indicates that the incumbent initially ran for re-election, but they later chose to withdraw

St. John's

Avalon Peninsula

Eastern and Southern Newfoundland

Notes

References

Further reading

Riggs, Bert (1981). "General Election #2A: November 1836". Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, volume 1.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1836 Newfoundland general election” is election in Canada. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Newfoundland, general and election, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1836, 1981—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Newfoundland, general and election is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “election in Canada” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7017953. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1836 and 1981.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “1836 Newfoundland general election”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 1836 Newfoundland general election primary sources, 1836 Newfoundland general election archive and Newfoundland research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1836 Newfoundland general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.