Chloe O’Shea shares her expert advice for locating and using records of people who travelled between countries
Passenger lists are used by family historians to trace the overseas movements of their ancestors – often due to emigration. You may be surprised to find that your forebear also travelled abroad for work, to study, to visit relatives or for tourism. Whatever the reason, there is a chance that one of your relations may appear in a passenger list and this can open up a new world of research possibilities for you in a different country.
Emigration may not always be immediately obvious to the researcher. An ancestor may disappear from one or two census returns before reappearing with no obvious clues as to where they have been. Many emigrants chose to return to their homeland, perhaps after a failed attempt at finding work overseas.
If there is a gap in a forebear’s documents in the UK, it is worth searching passenger lists to see if they journeyed abroad. These usually relate to long-distance journeys terminating outside Europe – so if your ancestor travelled to France, for example, there is unlikely to be a record unless they then travelled further afield.
Passenger lists are held in archives worldwide, and not all have survived. This can make it difficult to know where to search, or if what you are looking for still exists.
There are many reasons why a person may have chosen to relocate to another country. This was often for better work prospects, but may also have been to join relatives who were already there, to evade the law, or to escape persecution. The motive is not always obvious, and you may be left with unanswered questions. The best thing to do is to gather as much information as you can from the records in order to piece together the answer.
The amount of information you will be able to muster will depend on when your ancestor travelled, their starting point and destination. This also affects where the records are now held. Ships in the UK were only required to keep a list of passengers from 1842, although the majority of surviving records today date from 1890 onwards. Other countries’ legislation varied, so if your ancestor travelled elsewhere in the world, their entry may survive for an earlier date.
Outbound Passengers
If your ancestor travelled overseas from the UK, these are referred to as outbound or outward passenger lists. These are held a
