November 11, 2011

Newspaper Records of Passengers to Canada

There is a well-known dearth of early lists of ship passengers who arrived at ports in what is now the Dominion of Canada. The continuous "official" lists for Quebec City begin in 1865, and those for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and St. John, New Brunswick, begin in 1880 and 1900, respectively. Earlier surviving passenger manifests for these ports are incomplete for most years. Because of this void, alternative contemporary sources of names of arriving passengers are all the more genealogically significant. Fortunately, many of the early newspapers of the ports of arrival in British North America have survived. These newspapers record the names of some passengers (albeit only a small fraction of the total). Two of the most informative sources of names of steerage passengers in these newspapers are passengers' testimonials and survivor lists...

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