UK Immigration Records
UK Immigration Records
UK immigration records help English-speaking people searching their ancestry by presenting passenger ship name lists from the United Kingdom and immigration files in the regions the immigrants were traveling to.
Often, British officials were happy to see immigrants leave the British Isles or were even forcing these people and families to leave, so they kept legal archives of ship registries for convict ships, assisted immigrants, bounty immigrants and other so-called undesireables.
Immigration from the British Islands
For instance, some UK immigrants were convicts leaving for Australia, or were assisted immigrants whose passage was payed by the English government, in order to encourage specific types of workers to immigrate to Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania.
In other cases, the English government was happy to see religious minorities leave the country, as in the Irish Quakers who left for Pennsylvania in great numbers in the 18th century. When the Irish Potato Famine struck Ireland and millions of Irishmen were starving, British authorities were happy to see these unwanted subjects leave for other lands.
UK Immigration Records Sites
There are a number of UK based ancestry sites that offer free and paid access to their ancestry records. These are some of the best maintained genealogical resources on the Internet, though you might have to pay for some of the most detailed or oldest information.
Ancestry CO UK
Ancestry.co.uk is one such paid ancestry records site. This site has several novel resources, such as their archives of family trees, detailed search functions, links for fellow ancestry researchers to collaborate and a learning centre to help people learn how to research their genealogy. Ancestry UK even offers DNA ancestry information, to help you connect to your genetic cousins worldwide through the sharing of DNA information ($99 for a check-swab DNA test).
Included are newspapers and periodical, the aforementioned family trees, court records, land and property records, last wills, financial records, pictures collections, helpful dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference guides, as well as stories, memories and other peoples’ family histories.
Searching United Kingdom Immigration Records
Once you have learned who your family back in the United Kingdom was, you can research their genetic ancestors by searching through UK census records, birth indexes, marriage lists and death indexes and military records. Of course, there are plenty of UK emigration records.
GENUKI Emigration Archives
Genuki, standing for Gen UK & Ireland, has ships lists and immigration files for British immigration to all parts of the former British Empire and the wider world beyond. There is information for North America, South America, South Africa, India, what was called Australasia (Australia) at the time and even France, though this mainly involves French refugees coming to England in the 18th century.
One invaluable resource Americans of British origins can use is a link to the American Family Immigration History Center, which has files on the Ellis Island and Port of New York immigration efforts from 1892 to 1924. In this 32 year period, 22 million people immigrated to the United States. Most Americans today are going to have some cousin or distant relative who came to the United States during that time.
But UK immigration records comprise the entire globe, because of Britain’s world-spanning scope in the 19th and early 20th century, when most foreign emigration took place. If you want to learn who your genetic cousins are worldwide and you live in the United Kingdom, you may have to search through a lot of different national records online.
Related Posts
England Ancestry Records
Australia Immigration Records
Australian Immigration Records
Irish Immigration Records
Canadian Immigration Records
Canada Ancestry Records
This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Genealogical Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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