In this article we look at William Fortune and his young wife who set out for a new life in New South Wales, departing from London on the 13th February 1841 on board the ship the Jane Gifford.
The detailed records confirm the departure date, the ship’s name and much more. For example we are able to discover that William was from Newbridge, that he was a labourer aged 28 and a Roman Catholic. We can see that he was heading for Sydney, Australia and that William had been engaged by one Captain Flint at a wage of £19 a year.
Presumably William’s prospective employer, Captain Flint, was not the template for Robert Louis Stevenson’s piratical character of the same name, who would appear in print forty years later. As the shipping records also reveals to us, William Fortune could neither read nor write this fictional person with the same name as his boss may well have passed him by in the years to come.
An extremely powerful feature of searching the passenger lists on TheGenealogist’s website is the ability to look for a family travelling together. One click on the family group icon next to William’s results returns potential family members. We can see that his 19 year old wife, Susan, was also travelling with him. Her occupation is noted as a House Maid and she too was a Roman Catholic from Newbridge.
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Making a Fortune
Another charming nugget of family history information revealed by the ‘Potential Family Members’ search is that on the voyage William and Susan were delivered of a baby girl. Their child, Jane Fortune, was born at sea with her native place being prosaically listed simply as “Sea” on the passenger list. Jane is recorded as being aged 2 months and has then been pedantically noted in the records as being “under age”.
The passenger lists available on TheGenealogist can reveal a significant amount of information about ancestors that have emigrated to New South Wales in the 19th century. As we can see from the example above, the unique ability to search for relatives travelling together is a compelling reason to use TheGenealogist to research immigrants down under.
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