Week 40 (Sept. 30 - Oct. 6): Least

This week's prompt of 'Least' has required a bit of thought.  What area of my family history do I know the least about?  And why?

The answer would probably have to be immigration records.  It is an area in which I have always had difficulty finding information, and several branches of my family seem to have swum their way to Australia.

Why can shipping records be so problematic?  Over the years, I have found a number of issues with shipping and immigration records.

Firstly, I need to consider alternate spelling of the passenger’s name.  These were times when literacy levels were low, and often our ancestors were not the ones who actually recorded their name.  It was the officials – the secretary, clerk, shipping or immigration official, etc who filled in the records, and they frequently wouldn’t stop to ask about spelling, or even check they had heard a name correctly.  Some people also used as alias for a variety of reasons, making their records difficult – or impossible – to find.

If the person travelled in steerage/was an unassisted immigrant/was a crew member who jumped ship, the details recorded about them may be scant or non-existent.  Females, children, servants and steerage passengers were frequently left off the passenger lists altogether.  It is also worth noting that prior to 1852, ship's masters were not required to record the names of unassisted passengers travelling from Britain to the Australian colonies.

Did our ancestors migrate in stages?  Not everyone went straight from A to B – some visited other points along the way, sometimes taking years to arrive at their final destination.  My Clark family, for example, migrated from Bristol, England and settled in St Kilda, Victoria.  I searched for their immigration records in Victoria for years – until, almost by accident, I discovered that they originally arrived in Australia at Launceston, Tasmania.  They lived in the nearby Tasmanian settlement of Port Sorrell for at least 6 years before making the journey across Bass Strait to the mainland and settling in St Kilda.  I had been searching in the wrong state.

Finally, not all records have survived the passage of time and remained legible.  It could be that the records we are seeking simply haven’t survived, or a damaged or faded beyond legibility.

So, for a variety of reasons, immigration records are my least successful are of research.