Australian Coastal Passenger Records 1852-1924

A wonderful new set of records has been made available on Ancestry.  The new dataset of Australian Coastal Passenger Records contains images of passenger registers for ships traveling between ports in Victoria, Australia, and ports in other Australian cities.

Records in this collection may include the following information:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Family relationship
• Nationality
• Departure port
• Departure date
• Arrival port
• Ship captain's name

Some names may be abbreviated, and children may be listed as "child with" and their parents' surnames. The registers have printed column headings with handwritten entries.

The registers were created by officials working for the government of the state of Victoria.  Laws enacted shortly after the state of Victoria was established in 1851 required ship masters to fill out register forms and submit them to customs officials before departing a port. The lists are formally called "Inward Passenger Lists (Australian Ports)" but are commonly referred to as coastal passenger lists. Beginning in 1924, documentation of interstate maritime passengers was transferred from the states to the Commonwealth.  The original documents are housed by the Public Records Office of Victoria in Melbourne.

These newly digitized records are a valuable record set for many whose ancestors did not migrate straight from A to B.  My Clark family, for example, emigrated from Bristol in England and settled in Melbourne, Victoria.  It took me several years of searching for their immigration records to discover that they actually travelled from Bristol to Launceston, Tasmania, then settled in Port Sorrel, Tasmania for several years.  At least 6 children were born in Port Sorrell or Launceston before the family moved to Victoria and settled in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.

This new dataset will hopefully allow me to establish exactly when the family moved from Port Sorrell to St Kilda, finally solving a long standing family mystery.  Time to get searching.