Ancestry.com has a comprehensive database of immigration records. They have Assisted and Unassisted passenger records. You can search for passengers lists of ships.
To find these databases in Ancestry.com select from the top menu ‘New collections’ and then search the ‘Card Catalogue’. By searching for ‘passenger’ in the keyword field it will bring a list of passenger databases. You can narrow this down to country by filtering the location (left side menu).
An assisted passenger is someone whose journey was paid for by someone else. This could be another family member, an employer or through a government immigration scheme.
The earlier immigration records generally do not contain a lot of detail about the passengers, but these do improve with later records.
The immigration records can tell you some of the following information:
Unassisted passenger
Unassisted passengers are people who were able to immigrate and pay for their own passage to the colony. These passengers often came out in the hopes of finding better prospects for employment and industry.
The type of information that you can get from these records are: