Finding ancestors online

Subscribing to Ancestry or Findmypast may well provide you with hours of genealogy fun as you attempt to track down ancestors using a huge range of facilities. 

However, often the ancestor remains completely invisible, which can be frustrating. The fact is that he may well be there but lurking under an incorrectly-spelled surname, or his birth and other major events were simply never recorded.

Try every imaginable spelling of his/her surname: that's a basic rule. With a name like GADSDEN, for example,  there are many variant spellings, all equally feasible. Sometimes the name may appear with one spelling on one record and another spelling on a different record.

In the South African context, you may be searching for a reference to the ancestor on NAAIRS, 
www.national.archives.gov.za hoping for a deceased estate file. Remember that if the individual died comparatively recently, about the mid 1970s, any estate file would be held by the Master's Office in the province of death and would not be referenced on the NAAIRS index. It is more complicated to trace an estate file under these circumstances: they are filed by year of death and may be in one of several off-site storage locations. 

If you are not certain precisely where the ancestor died, search NAAIRS under the database RSA, for all South Africa.

Not everyone who died in South Africa had an estate file lodged with the Master's Office. Reasons for this vary, e.g. the individual may have had no assets at date of death, literally no 'estate'. Despite your belief that the ancestor died in South Africa, he may turn out to have died elsewhere e.g. in the UK, in a different colony or on board ship. Search further afield.

Miss Bell

Shipwreck survivors 16: British Merchant Seamen's Records

Diverging slightly from shipwrecks, while we're on the topic of crews there are more than 2.6 million Merchant Navy Seamen records, which are being published by findmypast in partnership with The National Archives. The Merchant Navy Seamen records comprise two main sections: 

* Merchant Navy Seamen 1835-1857: records of individual seamen that the central government created to monitor a potential reserve of sailors for the Royal Navy. Over 1.6 million records are available to view between these dates. 

* Merchant Navy Seamen 1918-1941: records of index cards that the Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman used between the two world wars to produce a centralised index to merchant seamen serving on British merchant navy vessels. There are 998,838 records available to search between these dates.

Merchant Marine World War II

The amount of information listed varies, but the Merchant Navy records usually include the following information about your ancestor:

Name 

Age or date of birth 

Place of birth 

Photograph of your ancestor 

Physical description including height, hair colour, eye colour and tattoos 

Your ancestor's signature 

Name and address of next of kin 

Rank or rating 

Ship names or numbers and dates of voyages 

Register ticket (a merchant seaman's ID) 

Discharge number

As well as providing information about your ancestor's career, it should be noted that the Merchant Navy Seamen records can also reveal what he or she looked like. Many of the records include a photograph or a physical description, bringing you face to face with your ancestor. [Information from findmypast site.] What a bonus for any family researcher.

Ancestors in British India

If you have British ancestors who lived and worked in India from 1698-1947 explore the latest offering from findmypast in partnership with the British Library - 2.5 million records comprising:

•	Baptisms, marriages & burials
•	Army officers' marriage notifications
•	Records for other locations administered by the India Office (Aden, Burma, Kuwait, St Helena)
•	Civil service records
•	Pension registers
•	Probate records & wills Find out whether your relatives were aristocracy, tradespeople, civil servants or soldiers and finally discover those missing ancestors with new records spanning 200 years of history. http://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-united-kingdom-records/british-india-office-births-and-baptisms

I'm celebrating finding a vital but elusive baptism in Bengal ... made my week.

Finding passengers UK-SA after 1890

If you believe your ancestor travelled to South Africa by ship during or after 1890, your best bet for further information is to search findmypast.co.uk Passenger Lists under the Travel and Migration section of the site.

Not only can you search by surname, but also browse by name of ship. This may be the answer to a recent blog visitor’s query re the Grantully Castle’s movements in 1896. The Grantully Castle made three voyages between England and SA in that year, departing from Southampton in March, May and October. Further exploration – under passengers’ names - on findmypast should prove rewarding.

This ship was the first Grantully Castle, 3454 tons, built in 1880 and a sister ship to the first Kinfauns Castle. In December 1896 Grantully Castle ceased her work in the Cape service and was taken over by the Booth Line, with her name changed to Augustine, which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. However, she traded between Liverpool and South America until 1912 before ending up in the breakers’ yard. Grantully Castle (2), 7617 tons, was built in 1910 – by Barclay Curle, Glasgow, as was the case with Grantully Castle (1).

Passengers travelling from England to South Africa in the early days of the Union and Castle Lines had various options as to port of departure. Union HQ was at Southampton, from where the steamer would leave for the Cape, with a stop at Plymouth for the mails. The Plymouth call ended in September 1888, ships then calling at Lisbon instead where late mails, sent overland via Paris, were taken on. A sleeping-car service was arranged between Paris and Lisbon. The arrangement for the mails at Lisbon came to end in 1891.

Currie Liners, based on London, made a stop for some hours at Dartmouth after leaving the Thames. This route was more popular than that of the Union Line because it provided a pleasant visit to the beautiful estuary of the River Dart. The fortnightly departure of the Donald Currie Steamer from Dartmouth was an event, bringing business to the small port – shore-visiting passengers from London as well as arrivals by rail who were to join the ship at the river.

By June 1891 the Currie steamers changed their route, departing from Southampton instead of Dartmouth, thus ending the latter port's golden era.  It was only after the amalgamation of the Union and Castle Lines in 1900 that all mail steamers were finally based on Southampton.

When did my ancestor arrive in SA and on which ship?

This is the most frequently asked question in South African family history research. It’s also one of the most difficult to answer. To begin with, it depends on the ancestor’s point of departure: was it Hamburg or some other port in Europe. Did he sail from a British port? And during which decade?

If your ancestor embarked at a British port after 1890, outward-bound passenger lists are now online at findmypast

These lists exist from 1890-1960 and originate from Board of Trade records held in BT 27 at The National Archives, Kew. Destinations include Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Canada and USA.

Online access to these passenger lists is a valuable resource: there were no indexes to the original registers, many of them were fragile and took time to search. As they were arranged monthly by port of departure it was necessary to know an approximate date of departure and the port to have any hope of finding an ancestor. The online facility is a gigantic step forwards.

However, 1890 was the start of the final decade of the 19th c and the great era of British emigration to South Africa began much earlier, in the second decade of that century.

There are two points to bear in mind:

1. If an ancestor was part of an organized emigration scheme, there is a good chance of finding out more about him – or about them, if the entire family emigrated together.

2. If an individual passenger wasn’t part of an organized group but paid for his own passage and was free to settle in whatever part of the country he chose, his arrival is usually less easy to trace.