Emigration everywhere - AJCP

Emigration records in the AJCP

Emigration records are found across many government departments, County Record Offices and in  private collections. The records of the Emigration Departments of the Colonial Office contain a wealth of material about emigration schemes, expenses, as well as many personal letters from those seeking financial assistance to emigrate.

Use the search box on the AJCP portal page to start a search

Experiment with a variety of search terms, each yields a different set of results. Use quotation marks to keep terms together as a phrase

• emigration departments
• "registers of emigrants"
• emigrants
• emigration registers
• "emigration registers"
• emigration AND "South Australia"
• "emigrant letters"

The resulting search terms then appear in Trove in this format 

emigration registers AND nuc:"ANL:AJCP"

The AND is the Boolean operator, nuc (National Union Catalogue) "ANL:AJCP" indicates that the search is being conducted within the Australian National Library's AJCP collection. 

All of this collection is housed in the Diaries, Letters and Archives section of Trove. Only three records will be displayed from the original search so one needs to scroll down and select the green link See all diaries, letters and archives results.

From a "register of emigrants" search, a variety of dates, sources and details are displayed in the blue links.

To view an item, click on the blue link then scroll down and choose Get

Then choose View at Australian Joint Copying Project which brings one to the screen shown below.

The Browse Collection then displays the images or sets of images. In this case there are only 4.

Choose an individual image to view, enlarge to full screen and/or use the scroll button on your mouse or trackpad.

Emigration records are plentiful and found across a wide variety of films within the AJCP. There are hand written letters applying for free passage along with replies which deny or grant the passage. Your ancestor may not have emigrated but may have applied to do so and included the details of their circumstances to support their application.

It is not often that one can find an individual's name in emigration records by searching for the surname, but if you have some indication of the date of emigration you may have success in locating their records. 

In the next post I will address the vital role of the Finding Aids/Guides in enhancing searches.

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Previous posts in this series

A - About the AJCP | B -Browsing the Board of Trade | C - County Record Offices | D - Downloading Documents

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info