Week 8 (Feb. 19-25) Migration

The prompt for this week is 'Migration', which tends to make me think of the origins of my family in Australia, and why my ancestors made the momentous decision to leave their homelands and families and make the journey to Australia.

Migration 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.

For my own research, it was important to consider if my ancestors migrated 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.

One such example was the family of my great grandfather, James Nicholas Clark, who was born in Bristol, England or possibly Launceston, Tasmania around 1856, just as the family emigrated to Australia.  James’s younger sister Annie Amelia Clark was born 31 March 1857 in Port Sorrell, Tasmania, where the family lived for at least 12 years before they crossed Bass Strait and settled in Victoria.  I searched in vain for their immigration records for years before I discovered they began their lives in Australia in the state of Tasmania.  I had been searching for their immigration records in the wrong state.

Then there is my German branch of the family tree.  Carl Friedrich Beseler, known in Australia as Frederick, was born around 1810 in Hanover, Germany.  He was a shoemaker in Germany and a farmer in Australia, arriving in Adelaide on 1 April 1848 on the ship Pauline from Bremen, Germany.  Passengers listed were Frederick Beseler, Shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and 5 children.  The family lived in South Australia for 7 years before travelling overland to Victoria, where they settled near Ercildown.  Several members of the family are buried in Learmonth Cemetery. 

I would like to know what prompted these families, with young children in tow, to pack up and move halfway around the world, settle in one state of Australia, then pack up and move again several years later. For whatever their reasons, my original Australian immigrant ancestors made a huge leap of faith to leave their homelands and travel to a distant country, most with little chance of returning to their homeland if their new lives proved less than they hoped.