Most families contain ancestors who moved from an early rural homestead to a developing town, city or faraway country for financial reasons. Many had to move home in order to seek or maintain regular employment whilst history is littered with many more sad tales of families being forced to uproot through sheer poverty or persecution. Some were lucky enough to travel to a new life by choice. Other unfortunate souls were forcibly transported to a different country after being found guilty of or just suspected of misdemeanours, however minor in nature.
The good news is that civilised nations thoroughly recorded the movement of individuals from one country to another, and many of these records remain intact in various repositories worldwide. It is often possible to trace the travel record for an ancestor whether he emigrated permanently or just visited foreign lands. Families often travelled as a group many years ago, so researchers have opportunities to identify an ancestor’s kinsfolk when studying old travel documents.
For journeys overseas, the only form of transport was ships or boats until relatively recently. Shipping lines recorded boarding information, on-board berthing arrangements and disembarkation details. Customs authorities at the ports of arrival also recorded incoming passenger’s names and backgrounds. Many modern databases list substantial information about overseas travellers of old extracted from ship’s manifest registers. The original manifest documents can also be viewed and downloaded for copying. This type of data often records the whereabouts of the passenger’s last home before setting sail, so genealogists use these records to pinpoint a former family home and possibly some names from a previous generation who remained at the homestead.
High immigration levels in the USA were closely monitored throughout the 1800’s with attempts made to record the name of every incoming traveller. Later on
Towards the end of the 19th century, some countries started to introduce passport documentation. Continuing trends of mass population emigration led receiving countries to encourage new immigrants to apply for naturalization as soon as possible. This action would permit easier local tax collection and access to state benefits, as well as voting rights in democratic regions. Officials in the USA started to insist that arriving passengers had to have an American accommodation address; most new arrivals referred to an existing US home of a family relative. Lots of extra records relating to immigrant families survive to this day across the world.
When air travel became popular and affordable, a similar system of passenger manifests to that used on ships was adopted initially. These more modern records from the 1940’s onwards can be investigated where airline routes crossed national borders.
Irish Ancestry Research has the ability to quickly search all accessible databases to identify travelling ancestors, regardless of the timeframe.
Military Records
Prior knowledge of an ancestor's military connections, whether in wartime or in a peaceful era, can open up many exciting research avenues. By their very nature, military records are generally very precise and therefore highly reliable. We ask that ancestry research enquirers bring any military service history to our attention, regardless of the quality of known details.
Irish Ancestry Research will then advise on military record search possibilities and the kind of personal data usually supplied in each type of service record available.
