Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.*
This week I have been truly absorbed by what I could find in the 1940s decade of BT27 passenger lists.
Until I was asked to write an article for TheGenealogist’s website to showcase the new records that they were making available from their site, I had no idea that the war time passenger lists would be so interesting! I had assumed that it would be a time when only troops were being transported. While they obviously made up the bulk of the travellers, there are still some very interesting tales to find.
The Press Release from TheGenealogist is reproduced below.
RMS Mauretania; from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive
TheGenealogist has just released 1.4 million Passenger Records covering the 1940s. This expands our Outbound Passenger Lists to over 25 million and form part of our larger immigration and emigration collection on TheGenealogist. The new records feature passengers who sailed out of United Kingdom in the years between 1940 and 1949 these newly transcribed BT27 images are from The National Archives. The passenger lists released today will allow researchers to:
Discoverpotential family members travelling together using TheGenealogist’s SmartSearch
Find ancestors sailing to Africa, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and other destinations
View images of the original passenger list documents
See the ages, last addressand intendedpermanent residence
Fully indexed records allow family historians to search by name, year, country of departure, country of arrival, port of embarkation and port of destination
Researchers who had ancestors that travelled abroad from Britain in the 1940’s will find these records a fascinating addition to the vast collection of records on TheGenealogist.
*Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links. This does notmean that you pay more just that I make a percentage on the sales from my links. The payments help me pay for the cost of running the site. You may like to read this explanation here:
Many researchers ask “how do I find my ancestors in the records?” and then they may want to know “how can I use these records to build a picture of my ancestor’s story?”
A point to remember is that ancestors didn’t exist in isolation and a good strategy is to build up their life story by looking at the events and people that had an effect on their lives.
Families can be complicated entities with step fathers/step mothers and sometimes unmarried parties in the equation. You may find people that married then separate and even sometimes get back together. In my own family I have an ancestor who remarried his first wife, after a period of divorce, but I hadn’t appreciated all of the story until recently. The strands came together by reviewing various records that I had gathered at different times.
Over a period we may collect various diverse search results for an ancestor, but we may not see how they fit together to build a bigger picture. It is important, for this reason, that every now and again we go back and review what we have. Sometimes this can suggest places for us to continue our research to find the story of our forebears’ life.
While doing some research this week I noticed a fact appeared in three completely different records. It was a town name that I had not paid much attention to having previously assumed that it was of little relevance to my ancestor’s life.
Beaumaris, in Anglesey, was where a First World War Royal Engineer officer in my family tree had been posted as he awaited being demobbed. Kingsbridge camp was on the Welsh island and I had first seen it on his service record. From the pages of this document I had gathered that my R.E. officer was suffering from shell-shock and attending medical boards in Bangor. I overlooked the importance of the town as it seemed to me that it was simply a posting where he had been sent by the Army at the end of the war.
Page from a First World War officer’s service record
At a completely different research session, I had been looking at the time my ancestor spent living in Singapore and I had come across a Singapore newspaper website to aid me. Using the portal I had been able to find a snippet that gave the details of his marriage at the Presbyterian church in Singapore. In July 1921 he was reported to have wed Monica Mary.
The first thing that had struck me was I had not known that he had married this lady. In the WWI service record he had been married to a Mary Ellen, in Surrey, and family lore told me that he had been divorced from his first wife, then re-married her a few years later and they had then lived together in Singapore. No mention of this intervening marriage had been drawn to my attention.
The family stories also said that his first wife, Mary had been lost at sea while escaping from the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in the Second World War. None of this explained me finding a marriage in Singapore to a completely different woman!
Skip forward to another period of research and I was using the Outbound Passenger Lists in order to write an article for publication. While I had the online search page open, on a whim, I typed in the first wife’s name and found Mary’s passage out to Singapore with their young daughter in February 1926.
Then turning to the second wife, whom I wrongly assumed my subject had met in Singapore, I did a search for Monica to see if I could find her going out to Singapore in the first place. I discovered her leaving London in May 1921 bound for the Straits Settlements.
Another entry had Monica and her husband visiting the U.K. in 1925, the year before his first wife and child emigrated to the colony. While I was pondering all of this I noted the entry given on the passenger list for their last address in the United Kingdom. It was a street in Beaumaris, Anglesey!
Then the penny dropped. Monica was probably from Beaumaris in Wales. The R.E. camp where my ancestor had recuperated was also in Beaumaris.
Anglesey By Dr. Blofeld (OpenStreetMap) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons I next turned to some research that I had done at The National Archives. While looking into something completely different I had taken the opportunity to order up the 1919 divorce papers for the first marriage to Mary. These revealed that he had still been a serving Royal Engineer at the time of the petition by his wife and that his address was given as… Kingsbridge Camp, Beaumaris.
So now, by drawing together various records obtained at different times, I had him posted to Beaumaris in the Service Records; Beaumaris in his divorce papers; Beaumaris as the address in the BT27 Passenger Lists where he and his second wife were visiting from Singapore in 1925.
A simple search of the 1911 census records for Monica (with her surname) in Beaumaris and I quickly found her family and could then research them back. With the review of my previous research and by now paying attention to the town that had popped up in several records, I am in a position to speculate some details to add to my ancestor’s family story.
I assume that while suffering from shell-shock and recovering from his war experiences in Anglesey he met Monica and fell in love. He first wife Mary filed for divorce, though not for adultery, but for the reason that he refused to return home to her in Surrey.
Demobbed my ancestor decided to try his luck in another part of the world and went out to Singapore. Within a year Monica followed and they married within months. In 1925 Monica and her husband visited her family in Beaumaris, but by the next year my ancestor’s first wife and child were on their way out to Singapore.
What happened to Monica? That is the next direction for this research to go. An article published in Singapore seems to point to her dying in 1925 but this, naturally, needs corroboration. Was she sick when they made their last visit to Wales? Perhaps a Singapore death records will reveal what she died of.
Family history research has a habit of opening up more questions just as you resolve some of the others. In answer to the question “how do I find my ancestors in the records?” and “how can I use these records to build a picture of my ancestor’s story?” my response is review what you already know. Check facts that you may have overlooked or discounted because you thought them irrelevant and see where they take you. Keep your eyes open as well as your mind.
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Disclosure: Please note this post contains affiliate links.
Departure of the RMS Campania from Liverpool
TheGenealogist keeps on adding records for its subscribers and this week it has just uploaded online another four and a half million BT27 records for the 1920s. This tranche of Outbound Passenger Lists are really quite fascinating for the variety of people that can be found departing by sea from British ports in the years between 1920 and 1929. TheGenealogist already boasts a strong Immigration,Emigration, Naturalisation and passenger list resource on its site and by adding this decade of records TheGenealogist have been significantly expanded its offering for those of us looking to find our ancestors’ travels.
The fully searchable records that they have released will allow researchers to:
Identifypotential family members travelling together by using their clever SmartSearch. TheGenealogist has a unique system that is able to recognise family members travelling together on the same voyage. In the case of several people with the same surname on the same boat journey then it will display a family icon which then allows you the researcher to view the entire family with just a single click.
Find people travelling to America, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the Passenger lists of people leaving from the United Kingdom by sea.
See images of the original documents which were kept by the Board of Trade’s Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors.
Discover the ages, last address and where the passenger intended to make their permanent residence.
These fully indexed records enable family historians to search by name, year, country of departure, country of arrival, port of embarkation and port of destination.
Those family history researchers who have ancestors that may have travelled from the British Isles will welcome this terrific new release from TheGenealogist. It certainly adds an interesting decade, after the First World War, to their Immigration and Emigration collection. These records, which are already online, include passenger lists that go back as far as 1896 as well as the valuable Naturalisation and Denization records that researchers can use to find ancestors who came to this country and made their home here.
Below is an article that I wrote for TheGenealogist highlighting some of the well known names that can be found taking a passage on a liner in the 1920s
The 1920s decade of Outbound Passenger Lists reveal our ancestors’ travels, as well as those of many famous individuals.
Records that chart our ancestors international journeys can be really useful for building the stories of their lives. The documents can help explain where an ancestor has gone when we can’t find them in the records at home, and it was certainly not just the top echelons of society that will appear in passenger lists. In the past all sorts of people booked passages on ships for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they were emigrating for a better life or travelling abroad on business? For this reason we can find the voyages of our ancestors ranging from Labourers to Lords and Artisans to Authors.
TheGenealogist has just added another decade of the always intriguing BT27 records to its growing number of Passenger Lists. These fully searchable records were originally kept by the Board of Trade and listed the details of outbound passengers from U.K. ports. With this release we can now find voyages going across the Atlantic to North America and to the countries of the Empire and beyond. A search of these records can reveal our forebears departing from this country and in amongst their numbers are also included a large number of famous names from the past.
This new release has the likes of Master Douglas Fairbanks Jr, aged 13, who became a famous film star, returning to the United States from a visit to England and travelling on the White Star Line’s ship the Celtic. He is travelling with James and Betty Sally Evans. This appears to be a misrecording of his mother’s name, Anna Beth Sully Evans and James is his stepfather. They were on a 21 day passage to New York departing from Liverpool on the 11th June 1921. We can glean from the passenger lists the ages of passengers, who they were travelling with, and the country of their intended permanent residence – all of which can be useful to our family history research when we find an ancestor in the results.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr travelling with his mother and stepfather 11 June 1921
Researching in the passenger lists of this 1920s period of sea travel throws up many other famous names of the times. The 25 year old Harry G. Selfridge Jr, son of the founder of the London department store Selfridges, is one. We can also find the war poet Siegfried L. Sassoon and from the top ranks of the British Army there is Field Marshal Haig and Lt General Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Turning to the world of politics we come across David Lloyd George, the Liberal politician who became the wartime Prime Minister. Here he is travelling with his wife, Dame Margaret and their daughter Megan who would herself go on to become the first female M.P. for a Welsh constituency. By using TheGenealogist’s unique SmartSearch feature we can identify the family members travelling together on a voyage by clicking on the family icon.
On a voyage to Gibraltar in April 1927 we can find the 63 year old widow, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, the one time leader of the Suffragette movement. Without Mrs Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes campaigning for the right for women to have the vote, then Megan Lloyd George would not have even been able to cast her ballot, let alone have had the right to stand for election to the House of Commons.
David Lloyd George MP travelling with his wife, Dame Margaret and daughter, Megan, to Rio De Janeiro 21st December 1927Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst London to Gibraltar 8th April 1927 on the P&O ship Naldera
There are numerous authors to be found in these records. In February 1926 Hilaire Belloc, who was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century, made the short hop across the channel from Southampton to Cherbourg. The 55 year old was onboard the Orduna, a vessel of The Royal Mail Steam Packet company on its way to New York. Belloc gave his address as The Reform Club SW1, but for others the passenger lists can reveal the details of an ancestor’s home address before they travelled – information which can be very useful when there is no census to consult for the time period in question. For example, the entry for the 21 year old Noel Coward, travelling on the Southampton to New York run of Cunard’s Aquitania that left on the 4th June 1921 – Coward gave his address as 111 Ebury Street London. This was the premises that his parents ran as a lodging house and it was where he kept a room while he travelled abroad. It was also the address where he wrote The Vortex, his first notable successful play. His occupation on the passenger list for June 1921 was that of an Actor. In later transatlantic crossings, however, he is sometimes recorded as a Dramatist, an Author and as a Playwright.
Noel Coward’s home address was 111 Elbury Street, London
Searching for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sea voyages in this decade of BT27 Passenger Lists released by TheGenealogist, we see that the creator of Sherlock Holmes gives his address as 15 Buckingham Palace Mansions. This was actually the flat that the famous author and his second wife kept opposite the entrance to Victoria Station, although their main home was in Sussex and in other trips that address is recorded in the passenger lists.
Browsing the names of his fellow first class passengers we can see that the Literary agent Eric Seabrooke Pinker was also onboard and we can wonder if the two men mixed on the voyage. The arts were well represented on this trip as also travelling on the same ship was the artist Augustus John. John was a Welsh painter, draughtsman and etcher who had been an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom for a short time around 1910 and by the 1920s Augustus John was Britain’s leading portrait painter.
Arthur Conan Doyle and family travelling on the Olympic to New York 28 March 1923
Passenger lists are certainly fascinating documents that can reveal our ancestors overseas voyages and so help add detail to the stories of their lives. They can also be used to clarify where people have gone when we can’t find them in the records at home, as it is all levels of society that can be found in these records. This particular decade seems also to be very rich in the names of the famous as they departed from U.K. ports on their overseas travels.
See these and many more engaging family history records at TheGenealogist.
News out today from the British-owned online family history company DC Thomson Family History (the people behind findmypast amongst other websites) and The National Archives that they are entering into a joint project to make the records of 40 million civilians held in the 1939 register available online.
When they have got this data digitised, it is estimated by the company that the collection will comprise of near enough 1.2 million scanned full-colour images of documents. As the records cover the entire civilian population of England & Wales at the outbreak of WWII, this is quite a significant release for those of us researching our English or Welsh family tree.
What was the 1939 register?
It was taken on 29 September 1939 by the British Government and recorded personal details of individuals in order to issue identity cards and ration books. In later years it became the basis of the National Health Service’s records.
Findmypast say that , when complete, the 1939 register will be fully searchable online for the first time, opening up the past to a new generation of family and social historians, just as the 1911 census did on its release in 2009.
So what can we expect to find once this set becomes available to us?
The records contain the address, full name, date of birth, sex, marital status and occupation of individuals, as well as changes of name. Although the Register is literally within living memory for many people, information about living individuals will be kept closed for 100 years from their year of birth, or until proof of death has been authenticated.
From today, anybody interested in being kept informed about the project can register at www.1939register.co.uk.
Annelies Van Den Belt, CEO of DC Thomson Family History said: “This announcement is great news not just for British family historians and those with British relatives, but for anyone with an interest in history itself; providing a fascinating snapshot of the country as it stood on the edge of the most widespread conflict in human history.
“This significant project will bring these records to a global audience for the first time, and combined with the 1.8 billion records already available on our websites will make it easier than ever to begin your family history journey and uncover the powerful stories that lie within and that make us who we are.â€
Mary Gledhill, Commercial Director, at The National Archives, added: “The National Archives is delighted to be working with DC Thomson Family History to open up this unique record collection to the world, allowing history enthusiasts to discover more about the people at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the absence of a 1931 and 1941 census, this collection is all the more valuable to family historians trying to trace their ancestors.â€
The 1939 register project is the latest contract to be awarded to DC Thomson Family History by The National Archives. Record sets previously digitised by the company in association with The National Archives include Crime, Prisons and Punishment; outbound passenger lists; British Army Service records; Merchant Navy Seamen’s records; Maritime Birth, Marriage and Death indexes and the 1911 census.
Great news for those of us researching our recent ancestors from England & Wales. One of the most anticipated family history projects since the 1911 census.
Disclosure: Compensated affiliate links used in this post.
This week I have been tracing family who have left the shores of Britain to live and work, before returning here later.
For this I have found the incoming and outgoing passenger shipping records on ancestry.co.uk and the Britain Outbound Passenger lists on findmypast.co.uk useful for this.
I was able to pick up on my father emigrating to Singapore in August 1950 to work in what was then a British Colony.
Recently I have discovered that the National Library of Singapore has put its newspapers on line to search for free. Regular readers of my blog will be aware of how much I enjoy making use of the various newspaper resources in Britain such as the British Newspaper Archive.
The beauty of the Singapore collection is that it is free to search and you do not even have to register to do this. Naturally I was curious to see if my dad got himself into the papers while he was there and it is with some satisfaction that I found an article and photo of him on page 4 of The Straits Times on the occasion of his marriage to my mother at St Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral in Singapore in the November of 1951.
So sometimes, when searching for your British Family you have to think about looking outside of Britain for them.
What else did I find on the Singapore Newspaper site? Well nothing more on Dad and Mum, but quite a bit on my mother’s step-father who was an architect in Singapore and my Uncle Bill who was Deputy Health Officer of the Singapore City Council.
In my Family History Researcher Academy course, on English and Welsh Family tree research, I have a tutorial devoted to using the newspapers as well as lessons on how to use some of the other lesser known data sets.
The launch of the course at a special trial price was very successfully filled, but I have been asked if there is room for a few more members. I am considering these requests and could decide to open it up again shortly. To be kept informed go to: www.FamilyHistoryResearcher.com/trial
Disclosure: Some of the links above are compensated affiliate links that may reward me if you buy their subscriptions.
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