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Here is a Immigration Certificate:

enter image description here

According to the source it says:

  • Departure Date: May 1919
  • Departure Port: England
  • Ship Name: Prinzessin
  • Destination Port: Auckland, New Zealand

I have several questions and I do not know how to go about finding answers:

  1. Can we find the paperwork showing the date of the sailing (May 1919)?
  2. Can we find anything out about this Prinzessin vessel?
  3. I know that Ethel Nellie Eichler (nee Scammell) died in 1984 in Victoria, Australia. So how do we go about finding her immigration from New Zealand to Australia?

New Zealand

enter image description here

Australia

enter image description here

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  • 1
    I think you should ask three separate questions. You can always put the background into first one and then link to that as background for subsequent questions.
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 21:01
  • Do you know for sure that Ethel Nellie Eichler resided in Australia at the time of her death, or is that merely where she happened to be when she died? Sometimes people die away from home.
    – shoover
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 22:13
  • @shoover The gravestone refers to her deceased sons and they too died in the Victory area; in-fact one of them was in the same cemetery as her.
    – Andrew Truckle
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 22:35
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    Have you looked at other images for that filmstrip? Your first attempt should be to look at image 1 or thereabouts. If that doesn't help, then looking at adjacent pages of the original, working outwards should be next. I can see that there is a slot for Sailing Date but it's empty. Bear in mind that clerks would get bored writing the same stuff many times so might omit the date. I'd guess that the ship name is there to convey to people that it's the same voyage and you should interpret everything as having the same date - if you can find one.
    – AdrianB38
    Commented Nov 18, 2022 at 19:23
  • @AdrianB38 I scoured the whole document which has multiple collations of lists. The cards in question sporadically change from date to date.
    – Andrew Truckle
    Commented Jul 8 at 7:19

3 Answers 3

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Re Ships:-

I have several URLs - this one appears to be fruitful: "Books, boxes and Boats", which includes an option CLIP Vessel Data by Ship Name

If you search for ships starting with "Prinze" (to allow for misspellings), that brings up just one ship - Prinzessin. Selecting that gives us important information like the Official Number 143077, and basic details. The last line of details refers to the ML (Merchant Navy List) of 1920 which shows 143077 Prinzessin to have been registered at London 1919 and built at Hamburg in 1905. It appears to belong to the Union Castle line of London (column headings are visible on the previous page - page number is near to the top right). Nett tonnage 3697, gross 6387, engine horsepower 622.

Near the top left is Year - if you click on the down arrow, you see the 1919 entries for the MNL, with no Prinzessin. This suggests one possibility to be explored - that Prinzessin was handed over to the Allies at the end of WW1 as reparations.

Quite often, it then makes sense to search details of the shipping line - Union Castle's ships are accessible (sort of) from Union Castle Mail Steamship Co Register and the WW1 Managed Ships section has an entry for the Prinzessin. This entry includes a photo and the data that the ship was managed from 1921 as the French ship General Voyron. Learning point: things like the Merchant Navy List are British documents and while removal from the register may mean it's sunk or dismantled, it may also mean that it's been sold out of British service - where British probably includes British Empire.

The General Voyron name is more amenable to searching and turns up this Wikimedia link: Category:Prinzessin (ship, 1906) That confirms Prinzessin was seized as war reparations and indicates that she was built as Prinzessin for the Deutsche Ost-Afrika Linie, Hamburg. Whether there is much more data available, I don't know - searching for Prinzessin gives way too many answers as the word simply means Princess and even restricting it to ships doesn't help because the earlier Prinzessin Victoria Luise is regarded as the first cruise liner so has a lot of internet entries.

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This answer is a stub and may be fleshed out later.

Can we find the paperwork showing the date of the sailing (May 1919)?

May 1919 is within the date range of Outward Passenger lists we can search online (BT 27, 1890-1960). See TNA's Discovery and the other research guides listed below.

Research Guides:

Outward Passenger Lists:

Researching the ship

There are several Qs on GenealogySE about researching ships already. Several of the questions tagged ship are probably misleading because they are more about the individual passenger, but looking at the tag is a way to get started. Even though the questions may not be asking about ships sailing to New Zealand or Australia, or during the same time period as your question, you can use the answers as clues to what records might exist and to see the methodology used. If this is not enough to get you started on answering the question yourself, please ask a new question and say what information you would like to find, what research you have done so far, and in what way the information in the prior questions didn't help you.

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Looking at the Military papers of Edith's husband it looks like I accidentally stumbled upon the answer!!!!

Military Extract

To quote:

16.5.19, Returned per S.S "PRINZESSIN" London

So, we now know that:

  1. The date of the voyage was 16th May, 1919.
  2. Edith was on the same ship as her husband August Eichler.
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