Emigrants from Britian in the 1800s
– Sherry Irvine, CGRS, FSA (Scot)
I have been asked several times about records of those leaving Britain in more recent times. Many of the published lists concentrate on the earlier, pre-1775 period. Finding accessible lists and resources for the later years is more difficult. Nineteenth century emigration records for Britain, by which I mean England, Scotland, and Wales, are neither extensive nor centrally located. Despite these drawbacks, some of you may want to search for a record of the departure of your ancestor.
Begin by considering the resources at the Public Record Office (PRO), the repository of national records at Kew, west of London (www.pro.gov.uk/). Unfortunately, it is only in relatively modern times that records of departure begin. Outward Passenger Lists 1890 to 1960, found in class BT 27 (where BT means Board of Trade), contain lists of passengers sailing to places outside of Europe. The records are arranged by year and port, and are not indexed. If you find an entry, it will include the name, age, occupation, and home address. Passports start much earlier but were not required for everyone traveling overseas until the First World War in 1914.
Passports were first issued in the 1500s, but applicants were for the most part diplomats and merchants. The major group of registers of passports is in class FO (Foreign Office) 610. The outside dates are 1795 to 1948; indexes exist for 1851 to 1862 and 1874 to 1916.
Another potentially useful resource is reports to the government known as Parliamentary Papers. From time to time Parliament took a great interest in out-migration and ordered studies into the reasons people went, or into the condition of those who were now resettled somewhere in the Empire. There are not many of these volumes in the Family History Library, but they are in many good research libraries around North America and in major libraries in the UK. A guide for this period is the Select List of British Parliamentary Papers 1833-1899 (Ford, P. and G., Irish University Press, 1969).
The government encouraged people to emigrate, offering the enticement of free passage and land grants. There are a variety of records, letters, correspondence and registers. The classes are CO (Colonial Office) 385, Entry Books 1815 to 1833, and 386, Land and Emigration Commission Papers 1840 to 1876. These are concerned mainly with people going to Canada. However, many of those who selected Canada as their destination went subsequently to the United States.
What about records of emigration gathered at the local level? The Poor Law (Amendment) Act of 1834 made provision for the Boards of Guardians of the poor law unions to provide financial assistance to individuals and families to emigrate. This support continued to 1890. The boards were required to report who had received assistance, occupation, and destination. The records are now together in Class MH (Ministry of Health) 12 at the PRO, arranged alphabetically within the county and poor law union. Poor law unions were the basis of organization for civil registration and census taking. Lists matching parishes with unions can be found on the Web through GENUKI (www.genuki.org.uk).
Those who know exactly where their ancestors were living before emigration have additional options. Examine the poor records of the parish. Parishes were raising funds to help local individuals and families make a new start, before and after changes in administration of poor relief. The minutes of meetings of the parish administrative committee (kirk sessions in Scotland and the vestry elsewhere) and parish accounts are a likely place for information. Some parish administrative records can be found in the Family History Library but most are in regional record offices in Britain.
If you are researching the area around Glasgow in Scotland then the index to those making application to receive poor relief in the city, as well as Barony and Govan may apply. The start date is 1851 and the index is complete through 1900. This can be found at the Glasgow City Archives in the Mitchell Library. A similar index has been completed for the county of Lanark and Dumbarton is in progress.
For further information on the records at the PRO visit their Web site at www.pro.gov.uk, select 'Start Your Search' and then click on 'Leaflets Index' in the dark green bar towards the top. You need to select 'E' to find descriptions of records relating to emigration. I suggest you also check out this topic with the Research Helps of the LDS Web-site. Choose 'E' for England, and then the England Research Outline, where you will find the topic 'Emigration and Immigration.' You can, by the way, find this topic within other research outlines, for example, Scotland, New York, Pennsylvania—all found the same way.
For an interesting presentation on the transatlantic journey try the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich where you click on 'Passengers' to enter a section with several options about sea travel.
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Sherry Irvine, CGRS, FSA (Scot) has been researching her British ancestry for thirty years. She founded Interlink Bookshop and Genealogical Services in 1988; she currently lectures in Canada and the United States and is vice president of the Association of Professional Genealogists. You can e-mail Sherry with suggestions for future British genealogy articles at sherryirvine55@myfamily.com. She will not be able to send personal replies, but will feature some questions in upcoming issues of the Ancestry Daily News. Sherry also regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research.
Sherry is also the author of: Your Scottish Ancestry: A Guide for North Americans and Your English Ancestry: A Guide for North Americans
(Copyright © 1998-2001, MyFamily.com Inc. and its subsidiaries.), "Ancestry Daily News" (http://www.ancestry.com/dailynews)
Using a Search Engine Effectively
Sometimes directories and genealogy specific search engines are just not going to provide you with the information you need. That is where the major search engines come in. Search engines such as "Google", "Alta Vista", "Excite", and "AlltheWeb" use electronic spiders to index billions of web pages then rank them according to how relevant they are to the "keywords" you type in to the search box.
However (as discussed previously), typing in your surname by itself means being presented with an often unsurmountable list of pages, the majority of which are of no use to you.
I am now going to show you a few tricks which will allow you to substantially narrow the quantity of search results retrieved.
"+" and "-" symbols
Using "+" and "-" signs in front of your keywords is a useful technique supported by most major search engines. By adding a "+" in front of a keyword you are telling the search engine that you are searching for pages which contain all of the keywords you have entered i.e. +Wagner +Nicholas.
If I searched only for "Wagner", the search engine would return any page that contained the name "Wagner".
By simply telling the search engine that I want only pages returned that also contain the name "Nicholas", I will substantially improve the quality of my search results.
Using the "-" sign allows you to search for pages that have one word on them but not another word. This is useful if you share a surname with a well known celebrity. For example if your surname was "Cruise", entering Cruise -Tom into the search field would be a good idea.
You could extend this even further by entering +FirstName +Cruise -Tom -Nicole -Kidman. This will tell the search engine to exclude any page that mentions Tom Cruise and his now ex-wife Nicole Kidman.
Phrase Searching
While using "+" and "-" symbols is a useful technique, it is not so useful when searching family sites that contain pedigree information in large databases. There are often so many names in these databases that all the names you are searching for are likely to be found. For example, if you search for +Pat +Bishop, it is likely the database contains "Pat Stockwell" and "Sam Bishop". Thus even if "Pat Bishop" is not in the database your search will still retrieve unwanted results. This is where "Phrase Searching" comes in handy.
Phrase searching is a technique that tells a search engine to find pages that contain words in the exact order that you specify. This is done by enclosing your keywords in speech marks i.e. "Nicholas Wagner".
The search engine will view two words enclosed in speech marks as one search term and will only return pages that contain the name "Nicholas Wagner" etc, as a phrase where the two words are next to each other. The main problem with this technique is that any page that lists the surname first, i.e. Wagner, Nicholas will be excluded.
Phrase searching is supported by most of the major search engines.
Tip: Combine the "+" and "-" techniques with the phrase searching technique i.e. "+Wagner +Nicholas". To demonstrate how effective this technique can be I entered +Wagner +Nicholas without quotation marks into the google.com search engine and received 83,000 results. I then entered "+Wagner +Nicholas" and received 235 results!
Wild Cards
A wild card search allows a searcher to enter a character (*) to search for plurals of a word or variations in spelling.
For example, if you search the surname Sims, you can also search for the singular Sim. The wild card search would be: Sim*
This would return all matches for Sim and Sims.
The major search engines which currently support wild card searches are "Alta Vista", "AOL Search", "HotBot", "MSN Search", and "Yahoo".