How to find that SA passenger list?

Passenger lists 1863

There’s so much online about passengers to America and so little for those to South Africa: this is a complaint I hear almost daily. 

It may well be true, but the sheer weight of numbers favours North America. 

It is estimated that of the three million people who left Britain between 1850 and 1880, two-thirds of 

them went to the United States. By comparison, the number emigrating to South Africa was relatively insignificant.

An additional factor is that there has been no coordinated effort to transcribe South African immigration records in bulk. 

Transcription is a labour-intensive task and usually a volunteer’s labour of love, done in what was 

once the true spirit of family history research i.e. with enthusiasm, dedication and altruism, and 

above all the wish to share information freely with others. Such transcribers are a rare breed today.

These are a few of the reasons why, although there are some South African passenger lists available

online and with ongoing additions, they are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Full online coverage of surviving lists is probably an unattainable goal. Many South African passenger

lists haven’t survived the passage of time, either as handwritten registers or in newspaper shipping columns. 

Accuracy, or the lack of it, is another problem. Even the manifests of vessels chartered for group emigration schemes are riddled with discrepancies. Every ship carried a list of the emigrants on board, 

but nervous travellers often changed their mind at the last moment, fell ill or even died before 

departure, others stepping in to take their place. In such cases, there might be confusion as to 

who was on board at time of sailing.

If an emigrant joined a ship at a port other than the main port of embarkation, their names could 

easily be left off the passenger list. On arrival in the colony, the Captain’s passenger list would 

be given to the Port Captain and to the Emigration Agent who supplied copies to the press. 

This was similar to a game of Chinese Whispers, each version containing different information. Misspellings of surnames, incorrect initials and errors in the number of family members 

are common in newspaper passenger lists. Certain passengers were not emigrants at all e.g. 

the captain’s wife, the ship’s surgeon, the minister or the teacher taken on to school the children 

during the voyage.

Lists of departures from South Africa are as rare as the proverbial hens’ teeth. And, as the 20th c approached, the volume of shipping, either incoming or outgoing, escalated rapidly, making it 

more difficult to keep track of all individual arrivals and departures.