Passenger lists are very useful pieces of information to genealogists. It can help you to pinpoint exactly when an ancestor decided to leave the country of his or her birth and begin living in another country. Genes Reunited now has passenger lists that genealogists can view online, for free, through their website.
Genes Reunited is a genealogy website that is a sister site to both the Friends Reunited and the Friends Reunited Dating websites. The Genes Reunited website was launched in 2003, and is a good resource for genealogists to use. It is one of the UK’s leading family history websites, and it has over 11 million members using it. This is a place where genealogists can start their family tree, and get some help filling it in. There are over 515 million family history records located in this website that you can search through.
You do not have to be from the UK in order to become a member of Genes Reunited. Genealogists from the United States can sign up for free and so can genealogists from several other countries around the world. They also have a few subscription plans for those who are interested in them.
Recently, Genes Reunited has placed its passenger lists online, for people to view. These lists are from the years between 1890 and 1960. You can find details about the names of the passengers who were on each ship, their birth year, the address they lived at in the UK, their marital status, nationality, and what their occupation was. You can also find details about the name of the ship, the dates it was traveling, and its departure and destination ports.
These passenger lists cover the years between 1947 and 1960 when around 710,000 people traveled to Australia from Great Britain. A large number of the people that chose to travel to Australia at that time were retired people. Plenty of the people who were on the passenger ships had the occupation of “housewife”. There also were a lot of divorcees and widowers who may have been planning on making a fresh start in Australia.
Genealogists who have been trying to fill in part of their family tree, and have hit a brick wall, may find these passenger lists to be useful. Perhaps your ancestor left the UK, and moved to Australia. This would mean that you should begin searching through an entirely different set of archives and records in order to find the information you are seeking.
Image by Robert Cutts on Flickr