Passenger Lists statistics and graphs

Now that the Passenger Lists are a complete set we’ve been looking at trends and patterns in the long-distance movement of people by ship from the UK.

The overall number of passengers travelling for each 5-year period from 1890-1960 can be viewed below. Please note that the last bar is actually a six- rather than a five-year period (i.e. 1955-1960 inclusive).

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The number of passengers travelling to the five most popular destinations, USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, on the Passenger Lists can be seen here:

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Below is a graph showing the movement of passengers from the UK to the United States of America. It is worth noting that after WW1 and the Russian Revolution the USA looked to restrict immigration - the 1921 Quota Act restricted it to 3% of its foreign-born population of 1903 and the 1924 Quota Act to 2% of its 1890 population. This reduced its availablility as a destination for UK emigrants.

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This graph is for passengers travelling to Canada:

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Passengers travelling to Australia:

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Passengers travelling to South Africa:

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Passengers travelling to New Zealand:

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Passenger Lists now complete with launch of the final decade

Search for ancestors from 1890-1960

The last decade of the Passenger Lists has now been added, allowing you to search from 1890 all the way up to 1960, for ancestors leaving the UK. There are now more than 24 million passengers, across 164,000 exclusive passenger lists.

The 1950s - Elvis, Egypt and Emigration

The 1950s is often seen as a conservative period, in relation to the more radical 60s. Despite this it saw the birth of the teenager, with Rock ‘n’ Roll music emerging from America, the ‘Beat’ writers and the seeds of the Civil Rights movement. The intensifying Cold War between the USA and the USSR was played out in a race for Space: by the decade’s end Sputnik I had been launched.

Britain’s prestige was dealt a blow with the Suez Crisis, in 1956. Rationing was slowly ending, National Service was in place, wide-scale rebuilding after the devastations of World War Two were bearing fruit and thousands of ‘Ten Pound Poms’ took the opportunity to start afresh in Australia. Commercial sea travel was in its last days, with air travel becoming more affordable and prevalent from the 1960s on.

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Notable passengers on board in the 1950s

There are lots of famous faces and notable names in the final decade of the Passenger Lists. One of Hollywood’s greatest stars, Gregory Peck, can be seen aboard the Queen Elizabeth in 1950:

Matt Busby, the manager of Manchester United for many years can be found travelling with his team in May 1950, where Manchester United undertook their first tour of the States. Busby, whose tragic ‘Busby Babes’ died in the Munich Air Disaster in 1958, led the club to success in the European Cup in 1968.

Other notable passengers in the 1950s include Max Factor, Gloria Swanson, Cecil Beaton, Jack Buchanan and Bill Haley.

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Find your ancestors in the Passenger Lists

Search by person or by ship name alone. You can now also narrow your search with the name of a travelling companion. A comprehensive guide to searching the passenger lists can be viewed here

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Our premium Explorer Subscription offers you unlimited access to over 500 million records on findmypast, including the passenger lists, and costs £89.95 for 12 months - the equivalent of just £7.50 a month. The Voyager Subscription gives you 30 days’ unlimited searching of all the Passenger Lists for only £14.95. You can also view the Passenger Lists on a pay-per-view basis. It costs 10 units to view a transcription and 30 units to view, print and save the full-colour digital images.

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New decade added to the Passenger Lists - 1940 - 1949

Findmypast.com has added another decade of records to the UK Outbound Passenger Lists currently available. Records now include 20 million names within 137,000 passenger lists spanning 1890 to 1949.

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1940s - Horrors, Hitler and the aftermath

The first half of the 1940s was one of the darkest periods in history, with global war causing millions of casualties and the horrors of the Holocaust. Buoyed by the USA’s entry following the attack at Pearl Harbor, the Allies eventually secured victory in Europe. Victory in Japan came only after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Following Armistice the world looked once again to rebuild: the ‘Iron Curtain’ descended in the East leading to the beginnings of the Cold War. Thousands of women left their families and homes to start a new life in Canada, America and Australia with the soldiers they had met and married. ‘Home Children’ were sent away to Canada for a better life, with mixed results. Commercial travel increased, as did the possibility of travelling for business, to compete in sports and other events.

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Notable passengers on board in the 1940s

One man whose influence on the decade cannot be overestimated appears in the passenger lists, travelling to America in 1946. Winston Churchill M P, following defeat in the 1945 election as the nation looked toward the social reforms of Attlee’s Labour Party, can be seen with his wife, valet and maid on board the Queen Elizabeth:

The American film star Spencer Tracy may be seen on the Queen Mary:

Whilst the famous sculptor Henry Moore can be found travelling to New York:

Other notable names include Walt Disney, Elia Kazan, Benjamin Britten and Joan Fontaine.

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Find your ancestors in the Passenger Lists

Search by person or by ship name alone. You can now also narrow your search with the name of a travelling companion. A comprehensive guide to searching the passenger lists can be viewed here.

Start Searching Now

Our premium Explorer Subscription offers you unlimited access to over 500 million records on findmypast, including the passenger lists, and costs £89.95 for 12 months - the equivalent of just £7.50 a month. The Voyager Subscription gives you 30 days’ unlimited searching of all the Passenger Lists for only £14.95.
You can also view the Passenger Lists on a pay-per-view basis. It costs 10 units to view a transcription and 30 units to view, print and save the full-colour digital images.

Search the Passenger Lists now

Domestics in the Passenger Lists

The Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com allow you exclusive access to records which help to fill in the blanks in your family tree, to trace ancestors emigrating to start a new life and moving around for work.

Just as importantly, the Passenger Lists can also provide a fascinating insight into the way that your ancestors lived their day to day lives.

One trend, particularly in the Passenger Lists from 1890 - 1910 is the presence of domestic servants, valets and maids travelling with individuals or families.

These domestics were often noted down simply as, for example, ‘Mrs Cooper’s servant’ or tagged on to the end of a list of the family e.g. ‘and maid’.

The anonymity of the servant classes did have some benefits however.

Whilst their being noted on the Passenger Lists as simply someone’s valet or manservant doesn’t help their descendants looking for their records, they were often able to travel first class, a luxury they would never have been afforded on their own steam.

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New decade added to the Passenger lists - 1930-1939

Findmypast.com has added another decade of records to the UK Outbound Passenger Lists currently available. Records now include 18.4 million names within 125,000 passenger lists spanning 1890 to 1939.

The 1930s - an era of depression and despots

The 1930s were a decade that began with the Great Depression, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, and ended in war. The global economic crisis saw the rise of extreme politics, the birth of fascism and the end of the prosperity and liberalism of the previous decade.

People were still travelling for work, and pleasure, but from 1933 the rise to power of Hitler saw thousands of people beginning to flee the Nazi regime. These migrants weren’t offered a great deal of help; Canada, for example, claimed that it could offer entry only to “certain classes of agriculturalists’, whilst Australia proclaimed that it would be unfair to give one class of non-British subjects preferential treatment.

Notable passengers on board in the 1930s

A great many recognisable figures from sport, entertainment and the arts can be found in the 1930s passenger lists.
Arthur “Harpo” Marx can be seen travelling to New York in 1931

Whilst the British tennis legend Fred Perry is found aboard the Queen Mary in 1937

Other notable passengers include Laurel and Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Bob Hope, Cecil Beaton and Helen Keller.
A key figure in the 1930s was the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal helped to pull the States out of Depression. His son, Franklin Delano Jr. can also be found

Find your ancestors in the Passenger Lists

Search by person or by ship name alone. You can now also narrow your search with the name of a travelling companion. A comprehensive guide to searching the passenger lists can be viewed here.

Start Searching Now

Our premium Explorer Subscription offers you unlimited access to over 500 million records on findmypast, including the passenger lists, and costs £89.95 for 12 months - the equivalent of just £7.50 a month. The Voyager Subscription gives you 30 days’ unlimited searching of all the Passenger Lists for only £14.95.

You can also view the Passenger Lists on a pay-per-view basis. It costs 10 units to view a transcription and 30 units to view, print and save the full-colour digital images.

Search the Passenger Lists now.

Kaplinski on board

Many of you will have seen the moving story of Natasha Kaplinsky’s family, on the first episode of the new series of Who Do You Think You Are?

Her paternal grandfather, Moisza Kaplinski, can be found in the BT27 Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com. He travelled  3rd class from London to Cape Town, as a 23 year old single man, in 1929 aboard the Glengorm Castle.

The address of all the Jewish passengers on the list is the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter at 82 Leman Street, Aldgate. See our earlier blog regarding Jewish migration to South Africa ,and the Shelter,  here http://www.ancestorsonboard.com/getSingleArticle.action?id=The%20Cape%20Colony

More information on the Shelter can be found at TNA’s Moving Here website here.

 

Children of the Empire

Find the Empire’s Children in your family tree

Starting on Monday 2 July at 9pm a new six-part Channel 4 television programme called Empire’s Children will be examining the Imperial backgrounds of six British celebrities, including Dame Diana Rigg, David Steel, Jenny Eclair, Chris Bisson, Shobna Gulati and Adrian Lester. The programme will be looking at the last days of the British Empire and the impact that it had upon modern Britain.

Imperial records on findmypast.com

With findmypast.com you can investigate your own connections to the Empire and discover ones that you didn’t even know existed. The exclusive Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com currently cover every long-haul journey leaving the UK from 1890-1929 and include nearly 16 million names, detailing journeys to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, West Indies, Africa and many more besides. These full-colour, digital images make it easier than ever before to trace ancestors who left the UK for a life abroad or to serve the Empire for a few years. Search the Passenger Lists now.

Migration records

As well as the Passenger Lists, findmypast.com also contains a great number of other resources for tracing Children of the Empire. Search the Register of passport applications 1851-1903 as a perfect companion to the earlier passenger lists. Findmypast also holds a number of lists and registers for the East India Company, the India Office and the Bengal Civil Service. Search them now.

Overseas Birth, Marriage and Death records

Aside from Migration records, findmypast.com also hold extensive Consular and Overseas records. Find ancestors who were born, married or died abroad including our BMD’s at sea indexes.

Visit the website of Empire’s Children here

Another decade added to the UK Outbound Passenger Lists 1920 - 1929

Ancestorsonboard.com has added another decade of records to the UK Outbound Passenger Lists currently available. Records now include an incredible 15,749,960 names within 97,614 passenger lists spanning 1890 to 1929.

There’s more information available on the original images than in previous decades, such as each passenger’s last address in the UK, making it easier than ever to fill in the gaps in your research. 

The 1920s - bright young things and abdicating kings

It was the era of decadence and glamour. The Jazz Age in America, epitomised by the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Europe it was The Golden Twenties. With music, entertainment and art people looked to purge themselves of the horrors of The Great War; modernism flourished in both literature and an embracing of technological advances.

In this decade people were beginning to travel not purely out of necessity, but for its own sake. People still emigrated and travelled on business but were now also able to visit their family abroad, enjoy cruises and participate in international sporting events. Immigration to the USA began to tail off as, in 1922, the States looked to close their borders. This led to a growth in people looking to make Canada and, increasingly, Australia their new home.

Famous Names

Amongst the passengers recorded in this new decade are those from the burgeoning world of entertainment and sport. 

Noel Coward, Cary Grant, under his real name Archibald Leach

Albert Warner of the Warner Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford can all be found in the 1920’s passenger lists, as can the Third Lanark Football team.

The now defunct Third Lanark AC’s trip was to raise funds for Scottish exiles in Argentina; a copy of the letter negotiating costs can be viewed here.

Find your ancestors in the Passenger Lists

Search by person or by ship name alone. You can now also narrow your search with the name of a travelling companion. A comprehensive guide to searching the passenger lists can be viewed here.

Start Searching Now

The Voyager Package gives you 30 days’ unlimited searching of all the Passenger Lists for only £15. Our premium Explorer Package offers you unlimited access to over 500 million records on findmypast, including the passenger lists, and costs £125 for 12 months - the equivalent of just £10.50 a month. You can also view the Passenger Lists on a pay-per-view basis. It costs 10 units to view a transcription and 30 units to view, print and save the full-colour digital images.

Queens Advocate finds against The Crown

Today it is considered impolite not to discreetly overlook the complicity of African peoples in the slave trade. However, it is highly unlikely that the slave trade would have flourished as it did without the widespread and enthusiastic participation of Africans. Tribes such as the Ashanti in what was then the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and the Temni in Sierra Leone owned and traded in slaves. Ironically, Sierra Leone had been chosen by the British abolitionist Granville Sharp when seeking a colony for freed slaves and this led to the founding of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown in 1791. The Sierra Leone Company brought freed slaves from Nova Scotia and Jamaica to Sierra Leone and later, following the British abolition of the slave trade in 1808, the Royal Navy used Freetown as its base against slavers.

British relations with the native Temni people were generally amicable and trade flourished throughout much of the nineteenth century until an act of thoughtlessness and insensitivity by a governor, Sir Frederick Cardew, in 1893. Cardew received little or no money from London for the administration of the colony and needed to raise revenue, which he tried to do by means of a 5 shilling property tax. The tribal leaders took up arms at the indignity and the rising which followed in 1898 has become known as the Hut Tax War.

Afterwards, the Scottish barrister Sir David Chalmers QC was sent to investigate both the cause of the war and its conduct by the British. He found that Cardew was to blame. The Hut Tax was “obnoxious to the customs and feelings of the people” and was correctly perceived by tribal leaders as “taking away their rights in their country and in their property”. Moreover, it had been pitched too high and defaulters had been treated in a harsh and degrading manner. In short, the tax was unworkable, the people had a genuine grievance and the British now had their work cut out to rebuild not just the country and its infrastructure but also the confidence of the people. Unfortunately, Chalmers died shortly after submitting his report, the Colonial Office did not feel obliged to accept his findings and in 1900 the Hut Tax was re-imposed, albeit at a lower rate.

Click on the image below, which shows Sir David P Chalmers at the top of the passenger list of the Angola, dated 3rd July 1898, about to set sail from Liverpool to Sierra Leone. It is tempting to think that one or more of his four fellow travellers to Sierra Leone were accompanying him as part of a legal and secretarial support team but it is not possible to know this at this date.

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The South Africa Act 1909

On 20th September 1909 the British Parliament passed an act for the union of Britain’s four territories in South Africa - the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. On 25th September 1909, Louis Botha, the Boer leader and PM of the Transvaal, boarded the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Co’s Kenilworth Castle at Southampton to head back to the Cape. The Rt Hon Gen Louis Botha is shown on the British 1st class section of the ship’s passenger list: the column headed British Colonial is ticked against him and his wife “Mrs Botha”, which fact, had he known it, may or may not have pleased him. There is little other detail about Botha recorded on the list. There is no obligation to give one’s age and, as a courtesy to first class passengers, the pre-printed passenger list’s column headed Profession, Occupation or Calling of Passengers explicitly states that “In the case of first class passengers this column need not be filled up”.

The South Africa Act took effect the following year and in May 1910 Louis Botha became the first Prime Minister of the new dominion, the Union of South Africa.

World events. But did a relative of yours travel on that voyage of the Kenilworth Castle? Was he or she among the British billposters, blacksmiths, carpenters, clerks, domestic servants, engineers, farmers, fitters, maids, mechanics, miners, platelayers and stone cutters who travelled upon the same ship? Caught up in quite possibly the most momentous event of their own lives, such emigrants to South Africa may well have been unaware that King Edward VII had just given his royal assent to the South Africa Act and very probably were oblivious to the presence in first class of Botha and his fellow travellers who did not have to declare their profession, occupation or calling.

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Anyone for Jones River?

Some of the most fascinating of the passenger lists of the 1890s are those of the British & African Steam Navigation Company Ltd serving the West Coast of Africa. The lists themselves are pro forma, with “List of passengers per SS…” pre-printed at the top of the page followed by a space for the master to fill in the name of the ship, the date of departure from Liverpool and the destination. Each list is short, giving details of maybe a dozen or 15 passengers.

These handwritten documents are pleasing in themselves but what is particularly interesting about them is that the shipping company operated an “on demand” or “request” feeder service. In other words, rather than having a fixed itinerary, each sailing would call en route at those ports at which the fare-paying passengers wished to disembark. This means that, as a researcher, you do not know from one passenger list to the next where a ship will be calling. It also means that obscure and small ports or harbours sometimes appear in the lists.

The obscurity of some of the ports can create difficulties for us at ancestorsonboard when we come to check the transcription of lists and to match destination ports with countries for online searching. For instance, in the entire decade of the 1890s we appear to have just single sailings to places called Pedro and Jones River. The accuracy of the transcriptions has been checked and they are faithful to the original document. However, at the time of writing we remain uncertain as to the location of these two ports. We know of course that they must have been somewhere upon the route of the vessel indicated by the destinations of other passengers, but this simply means that we have to consider Madeira, the Canary Islands and the entire coast of Africa from Morocco round to the Congo. We believe that Pedro may well be San Pedro in the Ivory Coast. To date, however, we have not identified a Jones River in West Africa.

Click on the link below for a passenger list for a typical West Coast of Africa voyage from 1892. You can see the various stopping-off ports listed down the right-hand side. This list was chosen by way of example as it includes a Mr F M Hodgson travelling to Accra in what was then the Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana). Mr (later Sir) Frederick Mitchell Hodgson was the Governor of this British colony at various points between 1889 and 1900 and features at least seven times in the passenger lists for the 1890s. There are also two lists which presumably refer to his wife, the earlier one as Mrs and the later as Lady Hodgson. You can find other Administrators and Governors of British West African colonies in the BT27 passenger lists for the 1890s – for instance, try searching for Sir Robert Baxter Llewelyn (going to Gambia), or Frederick Cardew or William Hollingworth Quayle Jones (both Governors of Sierra Leone).

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The Cape Colony

If we think of it at all, most of us think of Jewish migrants from the Russian Empire either side of 1900 as having fled the persecution and poverty there for the safe shores of USA. However, this is not the whole story. The passenger lists in BT27 help to illuminate the lesser-known story of the Jews from Russia who travelled to South Africa.

These migrants came especially from the region around Kovno, now known as Kaunas in Lithuania. They travelled via a port such as Libau (today’s Liepaja in Latvia) on ships bound, via the Baltic Sea and (after its opening in 1895) the Kiel Canal shortcut, for English east coast ports. From there, they travelled overland, usually via London, to Southampton to embark for the Cape.

This movement of people was not accidental: a whole business existed to cater for them, from the ticket agents in the Kovno area, to shipping lines such as the Wilson Line shuttling between Libau and Hull, to the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter in London which housed and orientated many of the trans-migrants, to the Castle Line and the Union Line which specialised in the route to the Cape. And like any successful movement of people, it became self-perpetuating, as the new South Africans sent home letters, and money, encouraging others to follow suit. The first South African census in 1911 indicates a population of 47,000 Jews, most of whom were Lithuanian Jews or “Litvaks” who had arrived since 1892, which also means that a great many of those Americans with Litvak ancestors are likely to have kin who travelled to South Africa. For more about the Jewish community in South Africa, visit http://www.jewishgen.org/SAfrica.

The image shows one page of an alphabetical 1896 passenger list from the Union Line’s Athenian. Alongside the miners on the gold rush, you will see Jewish surnames such as Cohen, Ginsberg, Grabowski and Greenbaum. Notice how the passenger list at this date had a column charmingly named “Foreigners” and how this is more populated than those for the English, Scotch and Irish.

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