An exciting new addition to Ancestry are the UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 which have just been scanned in full colour and made available from the Board of Trade series BT26 held at the National Archives in Kew. The BT26 series includes ships arriving in the UK from foreign ports outside Europe and the Mediterranean for 1878-1888 and 1890-1960.
If you have ancestors who visited the UK from Australia, the United States or other parts of the world outside Europe, why not have a look to see if you can find their arrival in Britain? You can search under name, birth year, port of departure, port of arrival, ports on voyage, ship name, shipping line, arrival year and keyword.
Select View Record to see a transcription of the record. At this point you can also click on a link to view information about the ship, and sometimes a photograph, from the Passenger ships and images database.
Viewing the original image of the passenger list will often give extra details such as occupation, address and intended length of stay in the UK.
This wonderful new source is freely available within the State Library building on our Ancestry database. From our home page select Search – Electronic Resources – Genealogy – Ancestry library edition. Once you are in the Ancestry database you need to select the following:
- Search
- UK & Ireland (under Browse by location)
- Click anywhere on the map of the UK
- View all Immigration & Emigration databases
- UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960
The image shown above (003866D) is from the State Library Pictorial Collection and shows the Southern Cross sailing from Fremantle in 1960.
