What CANNOT Be Found
It is important to understand that certain records should NOT be found in the collection. The main categories are:
Ships travelling between ports in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England
Ferry boats, including Cross-Channel, North Sea and Irish Sea ferries
Ships travelling between England and all European ports or any ports which lie on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, including all islands such as Malta UNLESS the ship's voyage started or ended outside that area.
Cruise ships, round-trip voyages
Lists for voyages which happened before 1890 DO NOT exist, unless it was one of the very few lists which escaped the early 20th century program of destruction. Those are for a very few arrivals into Queenstown between 1878 and 1888. There is just one Liverpool inbound list in that period, containing very few names.There are no others!
Ships bringing transmigrants into British east coast ports from Scandinavia, Germany, Holland and Belgium for example, before onward shipping. NO Wilson Line ships into Hull! See section on Transmigrants for help.
You also cannot find the names of passengers already on board ships from (say) Antwerp, which then called in to a British port en route to the United States, Canada, etc.
Soldiers and civilians on designated troop-ship voyages.
Ships heading for a British port which sank before they reached there. This means there is NO arrival list for the Lusitania's last voyage, nor for any other ship which did not arrive at its British destination for whatever reason.
But REMEMBER!
Although these categories of lists should not appear among the collection, rules were meant to be broken and the collection contains many examples which really should not be there! As with any situation where you may be desperate for information, these records should be searched in the slim chance that records have inadvertently been compiled and retained. You might be pleasantly surprised!
This is a commercial site. We make a small charge for searching and copying which helps fund our continuing indexing projects in these fragile original documents. If that offends you we apologise, but please do read the rest of the site as you may find useful information to assist your research.