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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Arandora Star

On 2 July 1940 the Arandora Star was hit by a German torpedo and sunk off the coast of Donegal, Ireland. The ship was transporting 1,500 German and Italian men to interment camps in Canada. Over 800 people died in the sinking, a figure exacerbated by inadequate lifeboat provision.

The Arandora Star was built in 1927 and intially sailed under the name Arandora. The Arandora’s maiden voyage was on 22 June 1927 to Buenos Aires, and can be found in the exclusive Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com.

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Rebuilt and renamed in 1929, the Arandora Star continued to sail as a luxury cruise ship. Records from it can be seen in our Passenger Lists, by searching under ship name.

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An example of the journies undertaken in peacetime by the Arandora Star can be seen below, from a cruise made in March 1939:

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The captain of the fateful journey in July 1940 was Edgar Wallace Moulton. He can be seen sailing her in 1939, in the Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard:

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A Canadian destroyer, HMCS Laurent, arrived to attempt a rescue mission, but it proved largely fruitless. Some of the scant lifeboats on board had been damaged by the torpedo, whilst others were unusable. Those internees that survived the sinking were still deported, sent on other ships as soon as possible to Australia.

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.

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Titanic passenger lists free to view at findmypast.com

With the Christmas Day special edition of ‘Doctor Who’ set on board the RMS Titanic, findmypast.com is making the original handwritten RMS Titanic passenger lists FREE to view during the festive season so viewers can discover if their ancestors travelled on the same journey as the intrepid Doctor. The original passenger list will be available to view online for free from Friday 21 December until Sunday 6 January.

View the free Titanic passenger lists

You’ve seen Kylie Minogue play fictional waitress Astrid Peth on the Titanic in Doctor Who. But what about real-life stewardesses on board the ill-fated ship?

Violet Jessop was 24 years old when she set sail from Southampton on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, working as a stewardess on board. She had already survived a collision on board one of RMS Titanic’s sister ships, the RMS Olympic, when it collided with HMS Hawke in 1911. Miraculously she also survived the sinking of the Titanic, just a year later, escaping in lifeboat number 16, and was picked up by the Carpathia after 8 hours.

During World War One Violet served as a nurse on board the RMS Britannic - the other sister ship of the Titanic and the Olympic. She was on board the night it sunk in the Aegean in 1916 after it hit a German mine. The ship sunk quickly and Violet was sucked under the ship’s keel, which struck her on the head. Yet again she managed to escape.

See Violet Jessop in findmypast’s passenger lists for free

Despite surviving three tragedies at sea, Violet was undeterred. She went on to work as a stewardess on cruise ships. You can see her listed in the passenger lists at findmypast.com age 45 in 1933 on board the Pennland.

She died, on dry land, in 1971 at the age of 84.  Was Violet the inspiration behind Kylie Minogue’s Dr Who character, Astrid Peth?

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh is primarily noted for his novels satirising the upper echelons of English Society, such as Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. He was, however, also an avid traveller and writer of travel literature.

Waugh can be found twice in the current Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com; once travelling to Tangier in 1933 and once to New York in 1938.

Here he is travelling to Morocco, listed as living at Brook St in London’s Mayfair.

Click here to see a larger version.

Here is Waugh, and his second wife Laura, travelling to New York in 1938. His brief marriage to his namesake Evelyn having ended in divorce in 1930.

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Among Waugh’s travel writing is 92 Days, detailing the time he spent in British Guyana and Brazil, a trip which inspired some of the novel A Handful of Dust.

Waugh also wrote about many other African, European and Near-Eastern places, including Abyssinia, Malta, Cairo and Constantinople.

One of the last two surviving Titanic passengers dies

Mrs Barbara Joyce Dainton (nee West) died on 16 October 2007 and was buried last week, in Truro, England.

Mrs Dainton was a passenger on the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage, along with her parents Edwy Arthur West, Ada Mary West and her elder sister Constance. She was 10 months old at the time of the sailing.

She can be seen with her family in the passenger lists

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Throughout her life Mrs Dainton shied away from all Titanic related press and publicity.

The last living survivor of the Titanic is Elizabeth Gladys ‘Millvina’ Dean.

Roger Casement - Reports and Republicanism

Sir Roger Casement was a British diplomat, lauded for his influential reports on human rights violations in Congo and Peru. So groundbreaking and revelatory was his work in exposing the ill-treatment of natives in these countries, he was knighted in 1911.

The Casement Report of 1904 led to the removal of King Leopold II of Belgium from his position of corrupt primacy in Congo.

Casement can be seen in the Passenger Lists travelling to Africa:

 

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His name has become synonymous not with his diplomatic work, however, but with the events of 1916.

Dublin-born Casement, partly as a result of a growing abhorrence of imperialism caused by his experiences in Congo and Peru, developed fervent republican sympathies. In 1916 he visited Germany in order to acquire arms and men to fight against British influence in Ireland.

Casement can be seen travelling to America in 1911, his ‘Sir’ appendage now in place:

 

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The trip to Germany was not a great success, he was promised far fewer arms than he had hoped, and gained little in the way of reinforcements for the nationalist cause. The arms were intercepted en route to Ireland.

On his return to Ireland, Casement was arrested, three days before the Easter Rising occurred. He was stripped of his knighthood and tried for treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown.

Casement was ‘hanged by a comma’, British treason law was seemingly powerless to convict him on the basis that he had been on foreign soil when he negotiated with the Germans. Nonetheless a suitable application of the law was found and, coupled with the outcry surrounding his infamous ‘Black Diaries’ he was sentenced to death.

Roger Casement was executed at Pentonville Prison in London on 3 August 1916.

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 His death record can be viewed on findmypast.com

 

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Prince Aly Khan - divorce and diplomacy

Prince Ali Solomone Khan, known popularly as Prince Aly Khan, was the son of Aga Khan III and is perhaps best known for his association with the sport of horse-racing and his playboy lifestyle.

Khan’s first wife was Joan Guinness, nee Yarde-Buller, whom he married in May 1936, just days after her divorce from Loel Guinness. 

Khan and Guinness’ relationship had begun during her first marriage, with the pair reportedly having ‘occupied a hotel room together from 17 May until 20 May 1935′. Khan was named in the proceedings of the divorce.

A list of divorce and matrimonial causes for 1858-1903 can be searched on findmypast.com. 

The pair can be found travelling together aboard the Colombia in the new decade of the Passenger Lists on ancestorsonboard.com, prior to Guinness’ divorce. Click on the image to enlarge.

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Khan and Guinness divorced in 1949, with Khan going on to marry the Hollywood actress Rita Hayworth in the same year.

The early hedonism of Aly Khan’s life meant that his appointment, in 1957, as the permanent spokesman for Pakistan to the United Nations came as a great surprise to many. Equally surprising was the aptitude for the role that he displayed.

Khan was elected to the post of vice president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1958. Tragically, only two years later, he died following a car accident.

Passenger lists to Argentina

Contrary to the impression sometimes given, Britain’s relationship with Argentina is as complex and multi-faceted as that with any other country. Military conflicts in 1806/07 and, more importantly for the modern memory, in 1982, and a football match in 1986, colour the picture but, when the bigger view is taken, it is clear that mutual enmity has not been the predominant emotion.

Britain was quick to recognise the newly independent Argentina in 1825. It did so because it recognised its own interests, both the opportunities for trade and the strategic need to pre-empt the United States in South America. British capital and goods flooded in and British communities developed, for instance in Buenos Aires (which was already 3,000-strong in the 1820s). Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain’s so-called informal empire - the regions where the country held economic sway - was at least as important as its actual empire.

British directors and investors effectively ran, and engineers and other technicians built, most of the large enterprises in Argentina, such as the railway, in the mid-19th Century. At the same time, Argentinean beef, mutton and grain were exported to Britain. The result was that by 1880 the Argentine Republic was “more important to the British economy than Egypt or China, or even Canada” (Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914).

This began to tail off in the Edwardian era but even as late as the eve of the First World War in 1914 British investment in Argentina (£319 million) was the same as that in South Africa, not far short of that in Australia (£350 million) and very significantly more than in New Zealand (£62 million) (Nigel Dalziel, Historical Atlas of the British Empire).

When World War One came in 1914, significant numbers of British in Argentina volunteered. The attached page of the passenger list of the Royal Steam Packet Co’s Meteor’s voyage to Argentina in July 1919 shows British officers and families repatriated at British government expense.

The BT27 passenger lists show a wide range of people travelling to and from Argentina. Many of the occupations given are related to the exploitation of the pampas - sheep farmer, ranch owner, wool buyer, estanciero - or to technical expertise - Cable & Wireless, railway official, civil engineer, accountant.

Some of the forenames of people travelling out to Argentina indicate earlier connections with the country - for instance, Carlos, Eduardo, Florencia, Orlando, Santiago. This is particularly true of the Welsh - see the Welsh in Patagonia blog for more information on the Welsh community. But don’t be surprised if, when looking at passenger lists for ships bound for Argentina, your search picks up a Francisco Smith, a Carlos Evans, a Juan MacDonald or a Catalina Murphy.

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Siegfried Sassoon - a simple soldier boy.

The poet and author Siegfried Sassoon was best known for his writing on the futility and horrors of war.

Born in Matfield, Kent, Sassoon enlisted in the military in the run up to World War One. His style of poetry altered dramatically as a result of the events of the conflict, and his meeting with Robert Graves, a fellow poet.

Initially a poet in the romantic vein, Sassoon’s experiences of the horrors of World War One saw his work become more grounded in gritty realism. His verse sang out the carnage of the battlefields in order to undermine government propaganda, which glamourised and simplified military life.

Suicide in the trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps* and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

After World War One Sassoon travelled, giving lectures and readings, avowing his new belief in pacifism and socialism.  He can be seen on the Passenger Lists in 1920 travelling to the USA:

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Sassoon’s other great contribution to the world of literature was his encouragement and championing of Wilfred Owen, who died in 1918 on active service. Owen’s reputation went on to outstrip that of Sassoon.

Owen’s death can be found in the World War One Soldiers Died records, part of the extensive military collection on findmypast.com:

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*the sound of exploding shells

John McCormack - a long way from Tipperary

John McCormack was one of the most highly acclaimed singers of his generation, recording and releasing hundreds of classical, traditional and popular songs.

Born in Athlone, Ireland, McCormack won the gold medal for tenors at the Irish National Music Festival (Feis Ceoil) in 1903, at the age of 19. Following this he travelled to Italy to be trained by Vincenzo Sabatini, a noted singing coach.

Success and accolades followed; McCormack was soon singing with the Royal Opera, their youngest ever principal tenor at that time, and releasing records which sold in great numbers.

His repertoire included traditional and nationalist Irish songs such as ‘The Wearing of the Green’, ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and ‘Macushla’; he was a keen supporter of Home Rule for Ireland.  McCormack was the first singer to record ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ which was the biggest hit of 1915 and a popular marching song with soldiers on the Western Front.

McCormack travelled extensively to perform, visiting America, Australia and even Japan, becoming an American citizen in 1917.

He can be seen in the new decade of the Passenger Lists, travelling with his wife to the States in 1934. He is listed as Count John McCormack and she as Countess. The ‘Count’ appendage refers to a Papal title given to him by Pope Pius XI to recognise his generosity towards Catholic charities.

It is worth noting that, although Irish born, the McCormacks are both noted as being citizens of the U.S.A. in the Passenger List entry, due to their naturalisation there.

Visit the website of the John McCormack Society here.

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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Moreton Bay Photo 2

To mark National Family History Week in Australia (4-12 August 2007) ancestorsonboard.com is launching the Moreton Bay Family History Challenge.

The Moreton Bay was the first of the Australian Commonwealth Government Line Ships designed to facilitate a state sponsored emigration of British subjects to Australia.

View a free two-minute movie entitled “Passenger Lists: People on the move” on the homepage of our sister site, findmypast.com. The movie contains original footage of passengers boarding the Moreton Bay for its maiden voyage from Tilbury, East London to Brisbane in 1921.

The accompanying full-colour 20-page passenger list will be made available free to view on the site from early August until the end of September.

Once you’ve seen the movie and viewed the images we want your help!

If you can identify anyone on the film or the list please email us at moretonbaychallenge@findmypast.com with the details of your research.

View an alphabetical list of the passengers’ surnames included on the list

To help you pick out individuals we’ve provided some stills from the movie. This entry is for photo 2 - if you recognise anyone in the photo please leave a comment here.

We’re giving away a free Voyager subscription to the first 50 people who can identify an ancestor within the 762 people who travelled on the Moreton Bay. If you think that someone on board is one of your ancestors, show us them in your family tree.

To be in with a chance of winning, simply upload your GEDCOM using the family tree builder on findmypast.com or start a tree from scratch using this new, free software. Once this is done email us at moretonbaychallenge@findmypast.com to let us know the details of your intrepid ancestor.

Use the family tree builder now

Please tell any of your family and friends that you think might be able to trace their ancestors emigrating to Australia aboard the Moreton Bay and present them with this exclusive way of researching their family trees.

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If you recognise anyone in this photo add your comments here.

Take the Moreton Bay Challenge today!

Good luck.

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.

A surprising find part 2

The plot thickens! Having now checked my records at home, it transpires that Harriet Sarah Towell was the mother of Thomas Towell - and the ages that I have for them on my tree match perfectly with those on the passenger lists.

BUT - I originally found these details on the 1891 England and Wales census, conducted some 8 months after their apparent departure to New York.

AND I also have a marriage certificate for Thomas Towell, dated November 1890 for a ceremony taking place in Hackney, London, and showing Harriet S Towell as a witness, and only 3 months after they appeared to be travelling to the States. I think I need to consult with some relatives on this.

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A surprising find

I’ve been researching my family history for the past 8 years or so, and I’m pretty convinced that all my ancestors prior to my mother’s generation remained within the UK. So it was with zero expectation that I typed my maiden name “Towell” into ancestorsonboard.com to search all years of the outbound passenger lists currently available.

I was rather taken aback to see one Harriet S Towell, aged 61, listed in the search results for 1890. I know from memory I have a Harriet Sarah Towell on my tree and it doesn’t strike me as a particularly common name. But what would she be doing travelling to New York in 1890?

On viewing the image, I can now see she was travelling with Thomas Towell, a carpenter aged 33. That strikes even more of a chord, as I know that my great-grandfather was Thomas Towell and he was a pianoforte manufacturer/ cabinet maker. Just a coincidence? I’ll need to check my tree at home to see how my Thomas and Harriet were related. Watch this space!

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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 loneliness of the South Atlantic

It is not easy to find positive comment written about South Georgia during the late Victorian or Edwardian period. “A barren snow-covered island in the South Atlantic, lying 800 miles ESE of the Falklands”, says one source from 1889, invitingly, adding as an afterthought “sterile and uninhabited”. Yet every possession in the British Empire needed its administrators and South Georgia, acquired in 1833 and annexed to the Falkland Islands, was no exception. There was no native population (other than that of penguins) to rule over, but there were itinerant sealers and whalers and, from 1909, that required the appointment of a magistrate.

The image below is taken from the passenger list of a January 1926 voyage of the Coronda from Glasgow to South Georgia Island. As he sailed to the end of the earth, the only passenger on board, 34-year old bachelor William Barlas of Pitlochry must have wondered what he had done to deserve his posting, and been grateful for the plentiful supply of long johns that his female relatives had knitted for him.

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The last of the Mohegan

In The National Archives’ BT27 passenger lists there is only one voyage for the Atlantic Transport Line’s Mohegan, on 12th October 1898, even though that voyage was actually the ship’s second. The reason for this is that the Mohegan was called the Cleopatra at the time of its first voyage on 29th July 1898. The Cleopatra proved less than shipshape on its maiden voyage, passengers complained and it had to undergo temporary repairs when it reached its destination in New York, followed by a full re-fit on Tyneside upon its return to Britain. When the ship was re-launched, the Atlantic Transport Line quietly changed the name to Mohegan to distance itself from the bad publicity surrounding the maiden voyage. Unfortunately, the second voyage from London to New York ended in catastrophe: the ship ran into the Manacles near St Keverne in Cornwall and sank within a quarter of an hour.

The sinking of the Mohegan is notable for several reasons. Among the more than 100 passengers and crew who were drowned was Joseph Charles Duncan, the father of avant-garde dancer and scarf-wearer Isadora Duncan. All bar one of the passengers on board appears to have been American, the sole exception being the sadly anonymous “Mrs King’s maid”, against whose entry on the list is the annotation “This girl was a native of Elstree” (in Hertfordshire). William McGonagall, possibly the worst poet in the English language ever to be published, penned the bathetic “The Wreck of the Steamer Mohegan” in tribute - see here: only the brave of heart will make it to the end. More recently, the wreck of the Mohegan has become popular with divers and was featured on BBC TV’s Coast series.

For more on the Mohegan story, take a look at http://www.geocities.com/jckinghorn/ATL/content/24Mohegan.htm

Ancestors on Board will introduce new “ship search” functionality later this year, enabling researchers to look for voyages of vessels without needing to know the names of passengers. In the meantime, if you are interested in the passenger list of the Cleopatra, you can find it by searching for Last name: Babcock and Ship name: Cleopatra. Similarly, if you are interested in the Mohegan, you can find it by searching for Last name: Duncan and Ship name: Mohegan.

Click on the image below, which is taken from the top right-hand corner of the first page of the Mohegan passenger list. It reads “The SS Mohegan was lost off the Cornish coast and forty of her passengers perished. The eleven who were saved have been taken out of this list”. In fact, “taken out” merely means that the names of the 11 passengers in question have been struck through in pencil on the list: all names remain legible.

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New subscriptions - unlimited access to UK Outbound Passenger Lists

Findmypast.com has introduced two new ways to access UK Outbound Passenger List records, a data set launched by findmypast.com in association with The National Archives.

The Explorer Package - Updated
Unlimited access for this package has now been extended to include the complete set of records* on findmypast.com, including Birth, Marriage and Death records, Census, Passenger Lists and all new additions for £125 a year, that’s just £10.50 a month.

The Voyager Package - New
30-day access to our exclusive UK Outbound Passenger List transcriptions and quality colour images for just £25, that’s just 83p a day.

For more information on all our subscription packages click here.

Sign in and click ’subscribe now’ in the green ‘account status’ box on the left hand side.

Subscriptions are fantastic value for money and offer a convenient way to do your research. View the transcriptions and high quality original images as many times as you need to, without worrying about units running out. Our subscription packages are tailored to give you confidence in your research and to ensure that you find the right ancestor.

*For technical reasons, access to Living Relatives will be limited to 10 searches a year and will be available to Explorer customers in April.

How the British never ran out of steam

British steamships were powered by the miners of South Wales and the North of England. Without coal, there was no steam.

If you were the master of a British steamship, responsible for safely conveying passengers and your crew from, say, London to Auckland NZ, you would not wish to run out of coal mid-voyage, and there was little risk that you would. At the start of the BT27 passenger list period in 1890, it was probably not untrue to say that Britannia still ruled the waves and the Government controlled a network of strategically-placed coaling stations ocean-wide for the use and benefit of the mercantile marine as well as the Royal Navy.

There were 14 main coaling stations in British possessions, at which vessels could refuel. Spinning your globe anti-clockwise from the international date line, the 14 were King George Sound and Thursday Island in Australia; Hong Kong and Singapore in the Far-East; Trincomalee and Colombo in Ceylon; Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea; Simon’s Bay and Table Bay in South Africa; Sierra Leone in West Africa and St Helena in the South Atlantic; and, finally, Jamaica and Castries Bay, St Lucia in the Caribbean. There were of course smaller coaling stations, such as Esquimalt in British Columbia and Perim in the Red Sea. Steamships were of course amply provided with coal, as well as other necessaries such as food and water, before they left British shores for their destinations worldwide, but the existence of coaling stations ensured that ships weren’t caught short and that passengers reached their destinations without inconvenience.

The Scottish West Indies

It has been claimed that the Scots created modern civilisation as we know it (see Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment - The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World). Certainly, Scots played a disproportionately large and influential role in the British Empire, making their mark across the globe as British army officers, administrators of colonies, plantation owners, missionaries, doctors and traders.

Jamaica is a case in point. The island had been a British colony since 1655, a fact witnessed, for instance, by the naming of its three counties as Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey. By 1817, an estimated 23.5% of the white population were Scots. Once slavery was finally abolished in Jamaica in 1834, the colony underwent an economic slump for several decades, during which the fortunes of the Scotch and other British planters suffered a severe decline. Investment from UK and America picked up from the 1860s, sugar was progressively replaced by bananas as the principal cash crop, and the country began to rally by the 1880s. By the time of the 1891 census, the year after the BT27 passenger list series begins, the population was 639,491, of whom only 14,432 (2%) were enumerated as being white.

The two main ports in Jamaica were Kingston (the port there was actually called Port Royal, but this name does not seem to appear on passenger lists) and Montego Bay. However, many passenger lists refer simply to “Jamaica” as the destination, the inference being that the ship would be calling at the capital Kingston. Most passenger lists of the 1890s and 1900s for Jamaica contain many Scottish names.

The first image attached is a page from a 1904 passenger list for a voyage of the Port Kingston. In common with many lists of the date, it seems that the ship’s purser paid little heed to the Board of Trade’s request to divide British passengers into English, Scotch and Irish: all on this page (and elsewhere within the passenger list) are counted in the English column and yet it is difficult to believe that at least some of the passengers named Mackenzie, Mackay, Meldrum, Mitchell, Tod and MacTavish were not native Scots.

The second image shows a solitary passenger, Donal Morrison, aged 23, single and a musician, sailing from Glasgow to Kingston in 1891 and bringing the very best of Scottish music to the Caribbean.

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Professional squatters

You learn something new every day working on the BT27 passenger list project. I now know more than I ever expected to know about the ports of Equatorial Guinea and the geography of the island of Borneo. I have also been reminded how much knowledge is culturally specific. For instance, when I wrote about Dr Barnardo’s on the Ancestors on Board website, I assumed, without thinking, that the charity was a household name across the English-speaking world: I was then e-mailed by a contact in America suggesting that an explanation might be of benefit to readers on that side of the Atlantic. Conversely, the subject I am writing about today may be familiar in Australia but was new to me, and I hope that Australian readers will bear with me for the benefit of British readers.

The attached image shows the first page of a passenger list of the Arcadia from 1890. This ship was sailing from London to Australia. Among the “ladies and children”, and the parson, the farmer and the nurse, are three passengers for Sydney who declared their occupation to be that of “squatter”. In both its early and in its contemporary meanings, squatting is associated with illegal occupation of property or land and therefore is usually pejorative. However, in Australia by the 1890s, the term “squatter” was used largely in a neutral and descriptive way. Ogilvie’s late Victorian era British Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, for example, states that “In Australia the term is… applied to one who occupies an unsettled tract of land as a sheep-farm under lease from government at a nominal rent”. Indeed, if the word carried a value judgement at all, it was positive and indicated admiration of the success and status of the occupation.

The three squatters Hass, Posner and Neame on board the Arcadia were young single men aged 29, 26 and 28. As they were sailing from Britain in 1890, presumably they had made an earlier voyage from Australia and had already establishing their landholdings in New South Wales. Although they are recorded on the passenger list as being English, it seems likely that all three were born in Australia. If so, we can only speculate as to what they may have been doing in England in the winter of 1889/1890.

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UK outbound passenger lists available from 1890 to 1909

Findmypast.com has added another decade of records to the UK Outbound Passenger Lists currently available. Records now include a staggering 7.5 million names within 50,553 passenger lists spanning 1890 to 1909 alone. Records, once complete, will cover 1890 to 1960 and are expected to contain more than 30 million individual passengers.

Nearly twice as many people travelled by ship between 1900 to 1909 compared to the previous decade and more increasingly for business and as tourists.

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Available for the first time online, these records can provide valuable information on ancestors whose trails have gone cold. Read Stephen Rigden’s article to find out how he broke down a brick wall of his own using passenger list records.

Start searching the Passenger Lists now.
You can start searching at ancestorsonboard.com. To view passenger list transcriptions and images you will need pay-per-view units. If you need to buy more units click here.

Why not search our collection of migration records?