Passenger lists

Ships´ passenger lists of voyages from the United Kingdom to destinations outside Europe survive from 1890 to 1960 in the series BT 27. They are arranged in date order by port of departure, and are now being made available online by Ancestry.co.uk at ancestorsonboard.com.

They can be searched from 1890 to 1929, unfortunately, the later ones are not indexed, so unless you know the port of departure and an approximate date a speculative search can be too time consuming.

There are separate lists for British and alien passengers. Lists can include age, occupation, and, from 1922, the address in the UK. Lists from the 1930s indicate whether passengers were travelling for tourist or leisure reasons.

Passenger lists survive for arrivals in Australia for all ports from 1924, and some ports for earlier periods in Australia. Further details can be found on the National Archives of Australia website at www.naa.gov.au.

Archives New Zealand www.archives.govt.nz/index.htm holds original passenger lists; those for some ports before 1910 have been indexed by name.

For Canada, most passenger lists survive for the period from 1865 to 1935. A few earlier ones are in the National Archives of Canada for immigrants to Quebec and Ontario from Britain between 1801 and 1849. Nominal indexes exist for 1925 to 1935 and information from the lists is available in a database available on their website www.archives.ca.

For South Africa there are incoming lists for Cape Colony and Cape Province in the Cape Archives Repository and for Natal in the Pietermaritzburg Repository.

United States Customs Passenger Lists survive from 1820, and Immigration Passenger Lists from 1891. Information is available on their website www.nara.gov. A series of volumes and supplements, Passenger Immigration Lists Index (Gale Group, and Thomson Gale), have been published covering the USA and Canada from 1538 to 1900. On www.ellisisland.org you can search online for 22 million immigrants to the USA who entered through Ellis Island, New York between 1892 and 1924.

There are other useful websites for passenger lists, some of which include transcripts of lists:

www.theshipslist.com indexes to various ships´ lists
www.freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~britshhomechildren - site for researching British Home Children sent to Canada between 1870 and 1940.