By providing the drop-down list, we save a researcher from searching for information which is not within the database. If a port is not in the drop-down list, this means that (to the best of our knowledge) there are no sailings from it.

However, they will not have sailed from, say, Glasgow if their destination overseas is not served by a shipping line operating out of that port, or if sailings there do run but are not departing at the date at which they need to travel. For instance, a person living in Scotland is more likely to have sailed from Glasgow or one of the other Scottish ports. Researchers should note that there is no strict geographical relation between, for example, a passenger's last address within the British Isles and the port from which they embarked overseas.

However, if you know that a particular passenger left from a particular port, or are only interested in passengers sailing from a particular port, you can select (for instance) Southampton from the list. The default setting is All, which allows you to search all ports at the same time. You need to bear in mind also that a significant proportion of passengers are shown on the original list without an age - these 'blank' ages are shown in your returned results together with those of the right year of birth, so that you can consider them as well.Īll British ports found so far within the BT27 passenger lists are given in an alphabetical A-Z drop-down list. You can of course reduce this option to 'exact' or '+/- 1 year' but you may be less likely to achieve a successful result if you do. Secondly, a passenger who is shown as aged 30 on a voyage on 10th June 1935 may have been travelling on their 30th birthday and only just turned 30, or they may have been on the eve of their 31st birthday.įor these two reasons, we use a default +/- 2 years when you search by year of birth. However, two points need to be noted.įirstly, the simple calculation ignores the date of voyage within the year: for instance, a passenger who was aged 21 and who travelled on 1st January 1911 is more likely to have been born in 1889, while a passenger of the same age who travelled on 31st December 1911 is much more likely to have been born in 1890, yet both will displayed in your results with the calculated year of birth of 1890. Where an age is given for a passenger in the original list, we have calculated the approximate year of birth using the simple subtraction of the age from the year of voyage.

The english passengers