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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Jewish refugees

As the Nazi Party’s anti-Semitic agenda became clearer and more brutal, thousands of Jews fled Germany and its neighbouring countries. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, the need to emigrate in order to avoid persecution became more urgent.

The 1940s Passenger Lists contain many Jewish individuals fleeing Europe for America and Australia. One example is a voyage made by the Brittanic on 3 May 1940 to New York. The ‘alien’ section of the Passenger List reveals a large number of Jewish passengers, many of them merchants. Most are from Germany and Austria.

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Some of the passengers are described as having their last UK address as the Council for German Jewry’s Kitchener Camp, in Richborough, Kent:

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The Kitchener Camp provided accommodation for almost 15,000 Jewish men, despite it having been designed to house only a fifth of that number. The camp was disbanded in June 1940 as, following the evacuation of Dunkirk, German and Austrian nationals were viewed as ‘enemy aliens’ and were subject to internment.

8,000 of the ‘enemy aliens’ were deported to Australia and Canada as the threat of German invasion increased, to ensure that they couldn’t pose any threat to national security.

War Brides

Thousands of British women found love during the Second World War. American and Canadian troops stationed in Britain during the War gained a reputation as being ‘overpaid, overfed, oversexed and over here’.

British women married these servicemen in huge numbers, with approximately 100,000 wedding Americans and a further 45,000 marrying Canadians. Once the war was over and peace secured the women faced a new challenge.

These women, who often had young children, had to travel with their new husbands back to America or Canada to begin their married life, away from the unreal wartime existence that they had been enduring.

The relocation of thousands of British women was a cause of controversy, not least because they were seen by some as taking the valuable places of homesick servicemen on board ships.

The first ship used for transporting the so-called ‘war brides’ was the S.S. Argentina. 452 war brides made the journey to America aboard her, and can now be seen in the exclusive 1940s Passenger Lists live on ancestorsonboard.

In the Passenger Lists you can find an exceptional level of detail, including the U.K address of the women and the name and address of the American serviceman of whom they were a dependant. Below is an image from the S.S. Argentina List.

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Conditions on board were deeply unpleasant, many of the women and children had caught a ‘camp fever’ during their stay at an assembly point before sailing. The arduous journey was only the beginning of the adventure for the new brides, and their children.

A long standing legal wrangle in Canada has recently been making headlines, as children of war brides seek to be recognised as Canadian citizens, a right denied them through a change of legislation.

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.

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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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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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Checking in with your American Ancestors

A feature of the Passenger Lists, from the 1920s on, is the inclusion of a last known address in the UK next to the passenger’s name.

This is of enormous use and interest for family historians - seeing where an ancestor was living before they emigrated or, indeed, went on holiday. It is also an easy way of being sure that the passenger on board is the person that you were searching for.

The inclusion of an address is not only of interest to those searching for passengers who were permanent residents in the UK, however. Viewing the latest decades of the Passenger Lists has revealed a trend, particularly amongst the ‘Aliens’ section of larger cruise ships going to the USA.

A great number of American passengers list London hotels as their last residence in the UK, affording you a fascinating insight into the style in which they lived and, perhaps more specifically, vacationed.

 

With this information in hand you might be tempted to undertake a family history tour of sorts, to retrace your ancestors’ footsteps and check into the hotel at which they stayed many years ago.

Hopefully your ancestors chose somewhere comfortable!

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The Contenders - The Gorgeous Gael, The Tonypandy Terror and The Whitechapel Windmill

The new decade of the BT27 Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com contains a great number of notable figures from the world of art, politics and literature.

An increasing presence in the Passenger Lists from the 1920s and ’30s on are figures drawn from the world of sport, as travelling to compete further afield became a more regular and feasible occurrence.

Many British and Irish boxers were drawn to America, by both the prize money and the prestige, to varying degrees of success.

Jack Doyle, born in Cork, Ireland, was nicknamed ‘The Gorgeous Gael’ and aside from showing great early promise in the sport was also a tenor, trained by the same man as the famous Count John McCormack.

His early fight career was impressive but he was unable to fulfil his potential, drinking heavily before fights and suffering defeats as a consequence.

He can be seen travelling to the States in 1937:

The trappings of his new-found fame were manifold -  Doyle married a Hollywood starlet, Movita Castaneda, who would later marry Marlon Brando. Together they toured music halls and in the late 1930s Doyle even appeared in a couple of Hollywood films, before sliding into poverty through serious gambling and alcoholism.

He descended into bankruptcy, prison (for assaulting a Garda Detective in Dublin) and ultimately died penniless in 1978.

Tommy Farr, ‘The Tonypandy Terror’, was a Welshman who, in August 1937, fought Joe Louis for the Heavyweight Championship of the World, at Yankee Stadium, New York. Although defeated, Farr gained widespread acclaim in lasting 15 rounds against Louis.

He can be seen en route to the fight in the Passenger Lists:

Judah Bergman, ‘Jack Kid Berg’, was a lightweight from Cable Street, London. He appears five times on the Passenger Lists in the 1930s. In the first he is only 21 and appears to be travelling with his whole family, as well as his manager.

Bergman moved to America in 1931, winning 64 of his 76 fights whilst there. A Blue Plaque has been erected at Bergman’s first home, Cable Street, East London, in honour of ‘The Whitechapel Windmill’.

 

Thanks to Alex Daley for additional research.

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.

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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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Titanic - unknown child mystery solved at last

Six days after the Titanic sank, the body of a baby boy was found and recovered from the North Atlantic waters by the recovery ship CS Mackay-Bennett.

The child was not identified and, as such, was buried in Nova Scotia with a tombstone reading simply ‘The Unknown Child’.

With the advent in recent years of DNA testing, a move was made in 2001 to identify the child and, to this end, researchers from Ontario exhumed the body and carried out tests. By consulting the passenger lists they had narrowed down the possible identity to one from four: Gosta Paulson (noted as Gosta Paulsson on the list), Eino Panula (Eina Panula on the list), Eugene Rice or Sidney Goodwin.

Initial tests concluded that the body was that of Eino Panula, but last week this was shown to be erroneous. Advanced testing carried out on a tooth from the body, when compared to the DNA of a surviving relative, confirmed that ‘the unknown child’ was Sidney Goodwin. A shoe recovered from the scene also ties in with the child having been British. 

Sidney Leslie Goodwin, previously ‘the unknown child’ was born in September 1910 in Melksham, Wiltshire.

Sidney was the youngest of six children born to Fred and Augusta Goodwin, all of whom were onboard. Neither his parents nor his other siblings’ bodies were ever recovered.

The family had been emigrating from Fulham to Niagara Falls, Fred having decided to join his brother in America and seek employment in a new power station opening near there. Initially booked on a steamer, the family was transferred to the Titanic due to a coal strike which prevented their planned sailing.

The family can be seen in the passenger list 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.

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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.

A surprising find - conclusion

My oldest surviving relative on the Towell side of the family is my Auntie Rene, now aged 86 and still with all her marbles intact. Could a visit to her shed some light on this new family mystery?

Indeed it could! - Rene was able to confirm that both her grandfathers, Thomas and his brother Joseph Towell, had travelled to New York in search of work. Their search had proved unsuccessful and they came straight back. Not only that, but Rene was able to show me a picture of Thomas and his brother, both with magnificent handlebar moustaches and ill-fitting bowler hats perched on their heads, reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy!

I wonder what would have happened if they’d found work - would Thomas’ future bride have travelled out and joined him? If so, would I now be writing this from the other side of the Pond? Or would they never have married? Perhaps I wouldn’t be here at all…

Rene was surprised to hear that her great-grandmother was travelling as well and I hadn’t seen any record of Joseph travelling. So I’ll keep searching for Joseph as the next decades of the passenger lists go live on ancestorsonboard.com.

Thousands are sailing

“Thousands are sailing / Across the western ocean / To a land of opportunity / That some of them will never see” (The Pogues, “Thousands are Sailing”).

By the time the Board of Trade began in 1890 to systematically collect details of all passengers on outward-bound long-haul sailings from Britain and Ireland - the records which now make up the BT27 passenger list record series - emigration from Ireland already had a long history. While emigration in the 1890s may have lacked the urgency of the famine years in the 1840s and 1850s, tens of thousands of ordinary Irish men, women and children were still leaving the country in the 1890s and 1900s. Most were bound for USA and were responding more to the “pull” of the New World rather than any “push” from the Old. Irish immigrants and their first and second generation descendants were making their fortunes and gaining positions of power in cities such as New York and Boston, and news of their success was constantly filtering back to family, friends and the wider community back in Ireland. Of course, numerically far more Irish immigrants in USA lived inner-city lives in poverty or on modest means than made it rich. As Shane MacGowan also sang on “Thousands are Sailing”: “Postcards we’re mailing / Of sky-blue skies and oceans / From rooms the daylight never sees”. However, it was the success stories which were heard and which continually re-stimulated emigration. Perhaps, after all, it is the hope of living with dignity, and the possibility, rather than any likelihood, of becoming wealthy, which provided the real draw.

To give an idea of the volume of Irish emigration, within the years from 1890 to 1909 inclusive, at present count there were 4,341 transatlantic sailings from the port of Queenstown (Cobh of Cork), 2,406 from Londonderry, 118 from Galway and 80 from Belfast.

Blue Riband

The Cunard Line’s RMS Lusitania is renowned for various reasons, not least of which is its sinking by a German u-boat during the First World War. However, an earlier claim to fame also involved the Germans: the Lusitania was the British steamship which in October 1907 achieved the fastest ever west-bound transatlantic crossing (the first to make it in under 5 days) and reclaimed the Blue Riband from the Germans (whose ships had held it since 1898).

There are two passenger lists for the record-breaking voyage to New York, due to the way in which the Board of Trade filed passenger lists which boarded passengers from more than one UK port. The Lusitania departed Liverpool on 5th October 1907 and Queenstown (Cobh of Cork) one day later on 6th October 1907. The Board of Trade filing system was by port, which meant separating lists. For decades, therefore, the Liverpool list has been filed in archive box 542 and the Queenstown in box 551 in The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew, which inherited the BT27 records from the Board of Trade. The same is true of all those voyages - and there are many - which picked up passengers from two or more ports. One of the longer term intentions of Ancestors on Board over the course of 2007 is to connect these lists in such a way that researchers - ship buffs and maritime historians as well as genealogists - will be alerted to the existence of the companion list and will not labour under the misapprehension that there is, for example, only one list for a particular voyage.

Click below for the first page of the Queenstown list for the Blue Riband winning voyage. Nearly all the passengers on this page are described as being Irish labourers and servants. Those persons whose entries are crossed out bought tickets but did not board the liner. Like some other returns of this period, this one was completed in pencil which has faded over time. However, one advantage of this is that the crossed-out entries are still legible, which might not have been the case had they been scored through in ink. Note that the reference to “24 days” in the header of the list is to the provisioning for the voyage, not to the actual expected crossing time!

Readers inspired by this article to exercise their sea legs might like to visit http://www.cunard.com.

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So that is where they went: using BT27 passenger lists to break down brick walls

Thomas was born in 1885 in his home town and I had found him marrying his wife Lucy in 1904 and having two children, Onslow and Lucy, born there in 1904 and 1906 respectively. But, after that, no trace: no evidence of his or of his wife’s death, or of the marriages or deaths of his children. Thomas’s branch on my family tree was left hanging there, like a loose thread. If you are anything like most family historians, there will be one or more of these loose threads hanging from your tree too and you will know how frustrating it is, and how every now and then you pick at and puzzle over it again.

But now I know what became of Thomas and his family. I have found him in London in 1906, boarding the SS Sarmatian for a new life in Quebec. He must have gone out in advance of his family, as many men did, as I have also found his wife Lucy and their two children two years later, in 1908, on the passenger list for the Empress of Ireland’s sailing to Quebec.

I then started looking at other brick walls on my family tree. I’ve found my great grandfather’s brother John also heading to Quebec in 1906 on the Kensington, with his three infant children but, for a reason as yet unknown to me, without his wife Elizabeth. Did she follow later? Had she died? One puzzle solved but another question posed: such is family history.

The passenger lists mentioned above are all contained within the second decade of BT27, the years 1900-1909, which will be published shortly here on Ancestors On Board.

Across the main to Maine

The Allan Line and the Dominion Line both served North American ports from their bases in Liverpool. The more northerly transatlantic routes were seasonal. Sailings to Quebec and Montreal in Canada took place in summer, when the St Lawrence River was navigable for ocean-going vessels as far as Montreal, but switched to Halifax NS and Portland ME during the winter months when the St Lawrence would freeze. The seasonal pattern to sailings means that if you know that a person you are looking for landed at, for example, Portland, they are far more likely to have arrived in the States after October and before April.

Many of the persons travelling to Quebec and Montreal were travelling on to destinations not within Canada but the USA, particularly in the Midwest: it is therefore always wise to consider passenger lists for Canadian ports when looking for evidence of American immigrants. It seems possible, from passengers’ occupations, that the fares to the four ports mentioned above might have been cheaper than those to Boston and New York further south, and this may have been part of their attraction.

Portland ME may not have the glamour of Boston or New York but by the 1890s it was a rapidly expanding town and busy entrepot, not just as a result of its being a hub receiving immigrants and other travellers, but also because of its handling of exports of goods (such as grain) from the Midwest.

Click on the link below to see the first page of a passenger list from December 1891. The ship was the Allan Line’s Numidian and it is notable that the transatlantic crossing from Liverpool to Portland was expected to take 37 days. The passengers detailed on this page are all recorded as being English - even the delightfully named single adult female Miss McGrotty, whom otherwise we might perhaps have expected to see in the “Scotch” column of the list. Other pages of the same passenger list show contingents of “Foreigners” with Northern European surnames such as Antila, Bender, Bilker, Jensen and Persson.

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Why we should be thankful for the Merchant Shipping Act 1906

BT27 records details of many types of traveller: emigrant, businessman, tourist, diplomat and so on. A significant proportion of the emigrants within these passenger lists did not begin their journey in the British Isles, however. These emigrants are known as trans-migrants or, in the charming terminology of the time, alien trans-migrants. Typical of these are the men, women and children who had embarked from ports in Scandinavia and the lands bordering the Baltic Sea for a British sea port, typically Hull, Leith, London or West Hartlepool. From their port of entry into Britain they would cross the country to a west coast port: for instance, travel by train from Hull to Liverpool, or from Leith to Glasgow. From Glasgow or Liverpool these trans-migrants would then board the great ocean liners bound for Canada and USA.

As the numbers of these migrants increased during the 1890s and 1900s, the British authorities reacted. In 1906 Lloyd George, the then President of the Board of Trade, passed a Merchant Shipping Act which, while largely focused on improving conditions for merchant seamen, required shipping lines to record basic details of the first leg of such trans-migrants’ journeys. This is good news for researchers, in that it provides evidence of the Baltic or North Sea route taken by Nordic emigrants. For example, a passenger list may indicate that a Finnish emigrant arrived at Hull on a Good & Co ship, or a Norwegian landed at Hull on board a Wilson Line boat.

For more on Norwegian emigration, visit Børge Solem’s excellent www.norwayheritage.com. You do not need to be blessed with Norwegian forebears to find Norway Heritage interesting, as the articles (which are written in impeccable English) are of value to anyone interested in transatlantic emigration.

Click on the link below for an image taken from a 1910 passenger list, which shows Danes, Norwegians and Finns bound for St John NB in Canada.

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USA via Canada?

The number and frequency of sailings to USA shows how lucrative the transatlantic trade was, with various routes served by competing shipping lines. There were regular sailings from Southampton, Glasgow, Queenstown (Cobh of Cork) and other ports, but not all travellers to America went via American ports such as New York and Philadelphia. The alternative option, especially if your destination was a northern State, was to travel via Canada.

It is noticeable from passenger lists from the 1890s and 1900s where the ship was sailing to, for example, Montreal via Quebec, that the “port at which passengers have contracted to land” field is being used for landlocked locations: in other words, places such as Chicago IL or Detroit MI to which a large sea-faring vessel could never have sailed!

It seems unlikely that the shipping line would have troubled to collect information of no significance to it. It therefore seems probable that in these cases the passengers had bought an inclusive through ticket, covering both their transatlantic voyage and their subsequent overland journey by rail, or possibly road, to their final destination.

The snippet from an 1890 Montreal-bound passenger list shows a passenger going on to Spokane WA and another heading to Calgary AB on the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway).

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