Passenger lists

Assisted and unassisted passengers

 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).

Assisted passenger

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:

• Names
• Age
• Occupation
• Place of birth
• Country of origin, port of departure
• Date of arrival, port of arrival
• Family member names and ages
• Religion
• Ability to read or write

 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:

• Names
• Age
• Occupation
• Place of birth
• Country of origin, port of departure
• Date of arrival, port of arrival
• Family member names and ages
• Religion
• Ability to read or write
• Name of the ship
• Class of travel – cabins or steerage