British & Irish Passenger Lists 1890
About the Passenger Lists
The Origins Network contains abstracts of all passenger lists for sailings in 1890 from British & Irish ports with US and Canadian destinations. These have been compiled by Peter Coldham directly from the original lists held at The National Archives, London, augmented by Canadian and US data. The names of 194,000 passengers are included. The original lists are often very difficult to read but we believe these abstracts are the most accurate available anywhere.

Some of the sailings from Irish and Scottish ports to North America remain to be completed: the missing names will be added to the database in the near future. Please note also that in the case of some sailings where there were large groups of foreign passengers (ie not British or Irish), the names of all such foreign passengers are not necessarily included.

The data provided includes:

Ship information: For each passenger: See Example of passenger list below


Departure ports
The 1890 lists cover a total of 921 sailings, from the ports all over the British Isles.

English ports Irish ports Scottish ports Welsh ports NB Many sailings, particularly from Glasgow, called at Irish ports (Londonderry and Galway) en route; there are usually separate passenger lists for those embarking at the different ports.


Destination ports
Destination ports included: plus one sailing which continued to the West Indies.

In many cases there are clearly multiple members of the same family present on the list, making these records much more valuable than simply records of of individuals. When you search on a person, you can display the passenger list for that sailing, making it easy to detect family groups.

Between 1890 and 1920, a particularly high tonnage of ships left British and Irish ports bound for North America. Many passengers were emigrants from Britain, Ireland and Europe. European emigrants went via the UK because it was cheaper to sail from a British port than a European one. The shipping companies required passengers to have British residency of six weeks, but many passengers too impatient to qualify for residency changed their names to avoid detection.

Passenger nationalities
About 30% of the passengers (57,000) were Irish, primarily departing from the Irish ports, but with several thousand sailing from Liverpool. There were about 100,000 English passengers and 14,000 Scots, with 24,000 “foreign”.


The Source Records
The source records are passenger lists of people leaving the United Kingdom (and up to 1923, ports now in the Republic of Ireland) by sea, which were completed by the ship's purser and kept by the Board of Trade's Commercial and Statistical Department and its successors. They exist for the years 1890 to 1960 and are now held at The National Archives, London (class BT27). The abstracts here were augmented by Canadian records.

The National Archives does not have an index of passengers and of ships, only lists of ports. To find a passenger in the source record documents, you need to know on which ship they sailed and the ship's port of departure. The Ellis Island website contains immigrant records which can help identify the ship and port of departure - and hence the relevant BT27 passenger list, but these records start only from 1892.


Example of Passenger List

Sailing Date: 03/Jan/1890
Vessel: Parisian, Allan Line, 3440 tons
Master: J. Ritchie
Route: Londonderry-Halifax-Portland
TNA Reference: BT 27/30
Comments: Only names of passengers to Portland abstracted
 First name   Last name   Occupation   Nationality   Age   Marital status 
Margaret McGuigan matron Irish 40 m
Rose McGuigan family Irish 18 s
Margaret A. McGuigan family Irish 11  
Catherine McGuigan family Irish 11  
Harry McGuigan family Irish 10  
John McGuigan family Irish 7  
Andrew McGuigan family Irish 4  
Teresa McGuigan family Irish 1  
William Lowry clerk Irish 22 s
See also:  Help on Searching - Passenger Lists
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