How did WDYTYA? research Sophie Raworth’s forebears?
QI watched Sophie Raworth’s episode of Who Do You Think
You Are? a while back and saw what looked like a passenger list from the 1790s showing her family leaving Birmingham for New York after the Priestley Riots. I have been trying to trace family who emigrated to the States at a similar time, and understood that passenger lists for that period do not exist. Do you know what records the researchers used, and do you have advice for tracing 18thcentury emigrants to the USA?
John Michael Spackman
AYou’re quite correct – passenger lists for people arriving in America generally do not survive prior to the 1820s. It may have been the 1794 New York City Directory that you noticed, which lists many residents alphabetically and gave us Sophie’s ancestor’s occupation and address. A collection of these directories published annually from the late 1780s can be browsed for free on the New York Public
Library website at digitalcollections.nypl. org/collections/new-york-city-directories#.
The website of the US National Archives and Records Administration contains lots of useful research guidance, including a
list of published sources at archives.gov/ research/immigration/passenger-arrival. html#colonial that act as finding aids to the names of some 18th-century settlers.
We also found newspaper articles useful for researching the lives of Sophie’s ancestors in America, and a collection of papers and gazettes published in the States in the late 18th century that can be seen at the British Library ( bl.uk).
The first federal census was taken in 1790, providing the names of heads of households only. The portions of it that survive can be searched at familysearch. org, ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk.
It’s always worth investigating what additional sources are available in archives local to where your ancestors settled. Our researcher in New York found a 1795 register of deaths from yellow fever in the New York City Municipal Archives, which named Sophie’s 5x great grandfather.
We were lucky with Sophie’s tree, not least because we tracked down a collection of family letters, which provided clues to information in other US sources.
Laura Berry