Alien registration
The Aliens Act 1793 required aliens to be recorded on entry at the ports and to register with local Justices of the Peace. Returns from the ports were sent to the Aliens Office in London. A few records of aliens survive among Quarter Sessions records in country record offices. Few records of the Aliens Office survive. Lists of aliens arriving at British ports between August 1810 and May 1811 are in FO 83/21-22
. Subsequent Aliens Acts of 1816, 1826 and 1836 required masters of vessels to supply lists of aliens to Inspectors or Customs Officers, detailing the number of aliens on board and their names and descriptions.
Certificates of Arrival have only survived for the period 1836 to 1852 in the series HO 2. Each certificate gives the name of the individual, nationality, profession, date of arrival, last country visited and signature. An alphabetical index of certificates, for the period 1847 to 1852, for some German, Polish and Russian aliens complied by the Anglo-German Family History Society is available in the Open Reading Room. There is also a surviving index to certificates from 1826 to 1849 in HO 5/25-32.
Returns of alien passengers made by masters of ships survive in HO 3. The lists cover the period from July 1836 to December 1860 and January 1867 to December 1869, later lists were destroyed. There are no name indexes to these lists, although the Anglo-German Family History Society has extracted some 36,000 names from them for the period 1853 to 1869. Their compilation is available in the Open Reading Room. Even for the periods where certificates of arrival and passenger lists survive, there was evasion and neglect of the acts, where masters did not provide lists and aliens did not register, so the surviving records are a far from complete record of aliens entering the country.
