Irish Passenger Lists

Official passenger lists from Ireland only exist from 1890. You can search, for free, the indexes to 24 million long-haul passengers who left from 35 ports in the United Kingdom (including, until partition in 1921, Republic of Ireland ports of Cork, Dublin and Galway), between 1890 and 1960, at www.ancestorsonboard.com. These passenger lists (which record UK addresses from 1922) are searchable by name, port, ship and date. This website records, for example, all emigrants who departed from Derry, via Moville, for USA and Canada, between 1890 and 1939, on the ships of the Allan Line, Anchor Line, Anchor-Donaldson Line and Dominion Line.

As a general rule, prior to 1890, you are more likely to identify passengers at the port of arrival as opposed to the port of departure. By the mid-19th century 70% of Irish emigrants entered the US through New York. The bulk of these passengers to New York are recorded on two websites; www.castlegarden.org for arrivals prior to 1892 and www.ellisisland.org for the time period 1892 to 1924.

In the USA, official arrival records of immigrants were kept from 1820. The ‘US Immigration Collection’, accessible by subscription at www.ancestry.com (or, for free, at your local library with ‘Ancestry Library Edition’) contains indexes to passenger lists of ships arriving from foreign ports to Boston from 1820 to 1943 (3.8 million immigrants), Philadelphia, 1800 to 1945 (1.6 million), and New York, 1820 to 1957 (83 million).

The ‘US Immigration Collection’ also names 4.7 million immigrants to USA and Canada, extracted from published arrivals records, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, 1500s-1900s); 16.3 million passengers arriving in the UK (from foreign ports outside of Europe) between 1878 and 1960; 8.4 million ‘unassisted’ immigrants to New South Wales, Australia from 1826 to 1922 and 450,000 ‘assisted’ immigrants to New South Wales from 1828-1896; and 7.3 million passengers arriving at Canadian ports between 1865 and 1935.

Passenger departure lists naming 19th century migrants through the port of Derry have been extracted from four different sources for the years 1803-1806, 1833-1839 and 1847-1871, and published in three books by the Genealogical Publishing Company: Irish Passenger Lists 1803 - 1806; Irish Emigration Lists 1833 - 1839; and Irish Passenger Lists 1847 - 1871. Indexes and scanned images of these three books have also been published in CD, Irish Immigrants to North America, 1803-1871, which contains, in total, 10 volumes of published Irish passenger lists, naming approximately 60,000 immigrants.