Trove Tuesday

Researching Immigration can be difficult for researchers for many reasons.  

Many arrivals into Australian ports were divided into categories.

• “assisted” (subsidised)
• “unassisted” (paying their own way), or
• “coastal” (travelling from another Australian port)

How a person arrived had great influence over the detail available about them.  Assisted immigrants generally owed the government money (or labour) in return for their passage and thus the records for them are usually fairly detailed.

For Unassisted and Coastal passengers, ship's registers frequently lacked detail.  Women, children, servants and steerage passengers were frequently left off passenger lists.  Names might be abbreviated - "J. Smith" or simply "Mr Smith", and children were often simply added as a note - "Mrs Smith and 5 children". 

Newspapers, however, often published shipping news, including lists of passengers as shown in the article below, which reports the arrival of my Beseler family in South Australia on the ship Pauline.

South Australian Register, Sat 1 April 1848

Included in the list of passengers are Frederick Beseler, shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and five children.  The article also notes that the ship had sailed from the port of Bremen, Germany.

Another Trove Treasure.