Ship Records-Where to start...

[DavidWW]

Where does one start when it comes to looking for ships one might have used to emmigrate to North America? I am trying to find my ancestors who we believe came from Rerrick, Kirkcudbright between the late 1830's and 1851 where they first appeared on the Conneticuit census in the US.

We are wondering what would be the likely ports to start looking for them to depart from, and would they have entered Canada instead of the US because they show up in Conn?

Would Glasgow been the main port of departure or would they have gone over to Ireland to depart from Londonderry? Or would there have been ports more likely in England as they were in the southern most part of Scotland?

What sites are useful for looking for ship manifests?

Jody

[Admin note: Duplicate post deleted]

Hi Jody

I deleted the duplicate post, but omitted to respond to your question.

The period in question, the 1830s to 1851 needs to be considered. Certainly, as far as I can recall there was no chance to hop on a train at the start of that period, and easily end up in Glasgow or Liverpool. Perhaps at the very end of this period.

Rerrick's an interesting parish, on the coast of the Solway, not that far from the town and port of Kirkcudbright, so that I'd suggest that you need to do some background research to establish where one could sail to, - Belfast being much nearer than Glasgow, but I'd be intrigued to see the respective milage down the Cumbrian coast into Lanacashire to Liverpool!

David

[Fraochale]

David,
When I was in Scotland in '94 we stayed in Kirkcudbright and I spoke with a local historian who told me that there would have been little chance that my ancestors whould have left from that port to NA, but did suggested that it was possible that they couldhave left from Ireland. As to how they got there(Ireland) we did find some patterns of people leaving from the west of scotland to go to Londonderry and then on to the US or Canada but we have checked many lists with no luck.

I have been trying to understand the history of the period as to why they would have left then and not looked back.And I found that with the influx of Irish fleeing the famine, the wages plummeted and my gggrandfather was just an ag worker so I imagine the lure of lots of land for farming inthe US was what drove them. We just haven't found when they were married, thinking that if we could find out on a ship record if they traveled togethered as married it would help with our research. As it is we haven't definitively found who his parents were, and when he was actually born. We have a pretty good guess, but it still just a guess. We don't find his parents on any of the census records so we also are checking for them as well thinking they mayhave all left at the same time. Though we know they first went to Conn and then on to Wisconsin but no family ( his or hers) ever came to visit or tothe best of our knowledge had any contact with the family here.

Would it have been possible for them to travel under assumed names? It wasn't as if they had ID's then or did they have some form of identification?

Jody

[Thrall]

Hi Jody, FWIW, my ancestors got married in Glasgow on 17/10/1841, jumped on a ship to Liverpool straight away, and on to New York arriving 29/11/1841 so all in the space of forty three days, which shows that even then, people could get around, and this before the days of steam! I admit that the ship concerned was the "Roscoe" and held the westbound record for a while, a good fifteen days, but that did not happen every trip.

Liverpool was a very big port, so even in the "wrong" country, don´t dismiss it entirely.

Good hunting,

Thrall