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In Looking for information about Anna Oldag (*10 Oct 1866 in Warmbrunn) I asked a number of questions about my great-grandmother Anna Minna Martha Oldag. I was advised I'd get better response by focussing on specifics, so I am trying with one part of the story, as told by her son in his memoirs.

He states that an aunt of hers traveled from Australia to Jerusalem to help take care of her after the death of her parents. This must have happened in the 1870s, more likely the first half of the decade. How would I go about finding what ships traveled from Australia to that part of the world, including possible transfer points such as Alexandria? Are there passenger lists available online?

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  • Do you know the name of the aunt? Do you know where in Australia (which consisted only of colonies at that time) the aunt lived?
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 2:41
  • Unfortunately, that's all I have. My great uncle was digging back more than 50 years in his own memory when he wrote these things down. But the aunt was German and joined "the German colony in Jerusalem".
    – user3697176
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 14:20
  • There are tons of databases with names of persons moving from Europe to Australia, but very little on the way back. I presume it was indeed much less common, but the ships that sailed to Australia, must, by and large, have come back, too. Yet, the records appear much more sparse.
    – user3697176
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 17:31
  • Are there perhaps passenger lists of immigrants to Jerusalem?
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Feb 4, 2018 at 8:44

3 Answers 3

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Given that the dates you are looking at postdate the opening of the Suez Canal (which opened in 1869) it's likely that they would have taken passage on a ship going from Australia to Europe via the canal.

Most of the manifests I've looked at for ships following that route have a stop at Port Said at the northern end of the canal so that's where I'd be looking for somebody getting off and perhaps transferring to a local vessel as liners would typically head west towards the Atlantic at that point.

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The majority of Germans arriving in Australia post 1866 (her birth) settled in South Australia or Queensland. You would need to search shipping records ex Port Adelaide or Moreton Bay (Qld) rather than the Outwards passenger lists for Victoria or NSW as suggested, remembering it takes 10 hours to drive in todays cars from Adelaide to Melbourne so unlikely they would sail from Melbourne. Trove.nla.gov.au (free online Australian newspaper indexes) has no references to the name OLDAG so they may have only been here a few years.

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Ancestry.com currently has 22 titles in their Passenger Lists collection for Australia.

Of these, there are at least two that record passengers leaving Australian states (formerly colonies):

  • Ancestry.com. New South Wales, Australia, Departing Crew and Passenger Lists, 1816-1825, 1898-1911 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.

    Original data:

    Ships musters. Vols. 4/4771–75. Microfilm publication, 2 rolls. State Records Authority of New South Wales, NRS 1289. Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia.

    Vessels and persons departing (outward lists), 1898–1922. Reels 563–579, 3149–3205. State Records Authority of New South Wales, NRS 13279. Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia.

  • Ancestry.com. Web: Victoria, Australia, Outward Passenger Index, 1852-1915 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

    Original data: Index to Outward Passengers to Interstate, UK, NZ and Foreign Ports 1852-1923. Public Record Office Victoria. http://prov.vic.gov.au/index_search?searchid=42: accessed 13 August 2015.

Only the second of these has records for the 1870s.

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