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Computers & Genealogy - Article #16
Ships Records & Passenger Lists
Either way, that leap can be difficult to make if your ancestors have not passed down to you such information as the date and place to which they immigrated, the name of the ship and so on. Even more difficult is the task of finding relatives who may never have arrived due to disease, shipwreck or other marine disaster.
Before we begin delving into the sites devoted to ships and passenger lists, there are some basics regarding these records that you should know.
Records of ships' passengers are a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout most of history, records of ships and passengers have either not been kept at all or have been kept by such commercial concerns as shipping firms who found it useful to track and record the passage of their ships from port to port. Even in such cases, it was often the cargo which was tracked and recorded, not the passengers.
With the rise of the great colonial shipping empires of the 1600's and onward, this began to change. In this period, Britain became arguably the greatest of the commercial seafaring nations. Their companies, including the English East India Company and later the Hudson's Bay Company were some of the first to begin keeping records of the passengers as well as the cargo on their ships. However, recording the passage of people on ships remained largely unknown and undone until 1799, when the United States became the first nation to require such lists.
The first such act to be passed in the United States required the names of passengers to be entered at the bottom of cargo manifests. Though technically required by law, this act was only rigorously enforced in Philadelphia. Conscientious recording of ships' passengers would have to wait another 20 years.
As the flow of immigrants to the United States increased in the late 1700's and early 1800's, the number of deaths by accident and disease on ships due to over-crowding of passengers had become a serious problem. In 1818, Senator Thomas Newton of Virginia proposed a limit of 2 passengers per 5 tons of cargo carried by ships as a means of limiting these risks. His proposed legislation also required that the names of these passengers be recorded for the purpose of documenting compliance with the law. In so doing, his legislation, passed in March of 1819, unintentionally handed a useful and valuable tool to genealogists of today.
In the beginning, only names were recorded, but as time went by, the required information was expanded to include the names of relatives travelling together, the ages of the passengers, the names and records of those who died en route and other valuable information.
Even so, these records are not always easy to find. Many of them are indexed, but many are not. Lists for states other than New York have, for the most part, been indexed. Records for the state of New York have been indexed for the periods before 1847 and after 1897 have also been indexed, but the 15,000,000 or so passengers who came to New York between 1847 and 1897 have not been indexed.
If you are searching for ancestors who arrived in New York during this period between 1847 and 1897, it is essential that you know the date that your ancestors arrived, the port at which they arrived and, hopefully, the name of the ship on which they came. Without this information, your search becomes considerably more difficult and can take dozens hours of looking through the actual records to find a single name.
If your ancestors came to this country through a port other than New York or came through New York before 1847 or after 1897, you can probably find them with just their names, by using the indexes that have been compiled for this purpose.
Having covered this essential background infoprmation on ships records and passenger lists, we can now begin discussing the many valuable resources available on the Internet.
This site provides a list of ships and their passengers sailing to British plantations and colonies between 1538 and 1825. The listing of ships provided at this site was initially based on "A Bibliography of Ship Passenger Lists 1538-1825", compiled by Harold Lancour, Third Edition, The New York Public Library, 1963. Since beginning this database, much material has been (and is being) added from a multitude of sources. Due to the nature of some source documents, changing styles of spelling and abbreviation, and the amount of data entry required, errors and misinterpretations do occur, a fact which you should always bear in mind when looking at records of this period.
The information available is not complete, but is being updated constantly. The list of ships includes nearly all which sailed to the American Plantations (British claims to the lands along the Atlantic coast, including a number of major islands). This is a large database and additional documentation on ship passengers which is slated for inclusion as it is properly formatted and indexed. In addition, they will answer requests regarding ship and passenger information, if no more than providing source references.
Strictly speaking, ship passenger lists do not exist for early arrivals in America. Many lists of passengers come from such documents as Oaths of Allegiance, etc., which were required for, generally, men departing England for the Americas. In many cases, wives and children who were also passengers were not even mentioned. In some of these cases, information is available from other sources, such as records of arrivals of families in settlements in America. An invaluable source for information about men, women, and children is the listing, at various times and locations, of "servants to the American Plantations", political prisoners sent, and similar documents. Not all such documents provided much more than names, not even ship's names, but do provide verification that a person made the trip and usually some form of date.
Note: In the interests of clear understanding, the "American Plantations" were vast territories of unsettled land and these "servants" were actually earning free ownership of some supplies and property for themselves. In exchange, they agreed to work for the Plantations (the community at large) for a specified, and reasonably short, period of years to help clear and settle the land. After doing what they wanted to do anyway, they had freedom, supplies, and land!
You can find this site at:
http://www.primenet.com/~langford/ships/shiplist.htm
One of the more interesting and potentially useful web sites dealing with colonial ships and passengers during the period before the passage of Thmas Newton's act in 1819, is devoted to the ships and passengers of the English East India Company. This site, which is a work in progress which is constantly being updated, will eventually to provide a separate page of information for each English East India Company vessel. The web site's author has started with lost, missing and captured vessels.
Currently, most listings include the tonnage, name and vintage of the ship, the number of guns and crew, the name(s) of the commanding officer(s), the orgin and destination of each known voyage and much more. The information on each ship listed is being expanded to include details of the circumstances of the loss, the names of the crew and passengers. There will also be details of any recent discovery of the vessel, any nautical archaeological investigation of the site, and a selected bibliography relating to each vessel.
You can find this site at:
http://www.ships.dircon.co.uk/
That should keep you busy until next month. Don't forget our upcoming class on "Computers & the Internet" which will be held twice, on Saturday, February 13th, 1999 and Saturday, February 20th, 1999. Like the first class, it will be from 9:00am to 12:00pm, though I will stay afterward and cover more material if the opportunity and the interest are there. There will be an internet-connected computer for every student. The tuition will be $8.00, all of which will pay for materials or be contributed to the fund for the Society's computer system. Bring a pen and paper and be prepared for a lot of fun!! Those of you who attended the first class know how enjoyable it was. If you want to take it again, as a refresher, don't hesitate; that's why we're doing several sessions. We will hold more classes if the enrollment warrants.
This month, I'll be covering several disparate topics which have been skulking around in that little rats-nest of interesting web-sites which have been neglected because we've been covering other topics. Next month we'll continue our search for interesting databases, but in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, we'll cover this panoply of small but interesting resources to clear our cyber-desk, so to speak.
Almost all of us will, at some point in our genealogical research, be faced with making the leap across the ocean. For most of us, this ocean will be the Atlantic; for some of us it will be the Pacific.
American Plantations and Colonies List
English East India Company Ships
© 1998 by Byron C. Bray. This, and all "Computers and Genealogy" articles, are copyright Byron C. Bray and may be copied for personal use but may NOT be reprinted without the permission of the author. Contact: byron.bray@cmug.com