When did my grandmother return to the UK?
QMy grandmother, Grace Mabel Conway, and her family left Liverpool on 29 January 1927 aboard the SS Ceramic bound for Australia. My information is that they returned to the UK by 1932, but I cannot find them in the incoming passenger lists for that period. Ronald Jones, via email
AThe first thing to say is that neither the Board of Trade Passenger Lists Inwards or Outwards are a complete record of all UK departures and arrivals to and from foreign ports outside of Europe and the Mediterranean. There are many instances where individuals and family are recorded as departing, but no record of their known return can be found, and vice versa.
That said, you need to make certain that the family you are interested in is definitely not recorded in one of these passenger manifests. The surviving Board of Trade records of Outgoing Passengers are available to search on three websites: ancestry.co.uk,
findmypast.co.uk and thegenealogist. co.uk. Therefore, if one of these sites does did not include the entries you seek then you could try one or both of the others: errors on one site may not be repeated on another. However, for passenger arrivals, you currently only have the option of Ancestry.
You will have found on the manifest of the SS Ceramic in 1927, that the family were listed only with forename initials: Mrs GM, and the children, all girls, as Miss EM, DG, etc. Mr GF Conway, Grace’s husband, has his entry crossed through, so presumably for some reason he did not sail with them. You will know that the full names of mother and daughters were: Grace Mabel, Edyth Mabel, Doris Georgina, etc. With no knowledge of exactly when they returned, or the name of the ship they were on, you are restricted to name searches. That being the case, you need to consider searches using the full forenames or initials only. It unlikely that ‘Conway’ would have been mistranscribed, but entries can occasionally be just Mrs or Miss with no indication of forename or initials – another consideration. Search for alternative erroneous transcriptions and think about using wild cards such as C*nway. Paul Blake