Genealogy at home: Fare Paying Passengers

Published on 24 March 2020

Many people came to Australia without assistance as fare paying passengers ie. they funded their journey themselves. Australia was a British colony, and so just another part Britain. Getting on a ship to come to Australia was equivalent to boarding a train from London to Glasgow, and no special paperwork was required.

Because there was no government involvement in this process, the records which exist are passenger lists and manifests of immigrants on board ships, and do not contain a lot of detail.

The issue with these records is that while First Class passengers are often listed by name, ordinary passengers are often not – often the only notation found to acknowledge the presence of these people is “plus 70 steerage class passengers”. Even when First class passengers are named, they are often recorded simply as Mr Smith or Mr J Smith – not very useful for researchers.

NSW Unassisted Immigrant Passenger Lists covering the years 1826-1922, and records for other states are availability on Ancestry.com, but as can be seen not every passenger on a ship will be listed. It is helful if you have some idea of date of arrival or ships name. Often the best that can be done is to ‘guestimate’ the years of arrival and look through the records for each ship which arrived.

Sometimes a death certificate or Probate entry in a newspaper will give give date of arrival and place of birth, or length of time in the colony.

Newspapers

Shipping and passenger arrivals in Australia were important news in the 19th century. Often names of passengers arriving were reported in the newspapers of the day, and if you have an idea of the time period to look or if the Surname is very unusual a TROVE search is a good idea and might provide the answer.

TIP: Many people came to Australia via New Zealand. It is worth checking Paper’s Past New Zealand https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/ to see if a record can be found.

Naturalisation and citizenship

The National Archives https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/ holds Commonwealth naturalisation and citizenship records from 1904 onwards. They also have naturalisation records for the Colony of Victoria from 1848 to 1903 and the Province of South Australia before 1904. These records give details of origin and arrival on Australia.

TIP: Don’t forget to check the 1828 Census if you think your ancestor arrived before this date.