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  • Passenger Lists

    Hello All

    Since the dawn of time, when a ship docked, someone from the local newspaper went down to the docks to find out who had been on board. Depending on how many column inches he had to fill, there was also how many male children and how many female children and if we are lucky manservants and maid servants.

    Sites like Ancestry allow you to view the manifest of all the passengers and crew of so many of the voyages, pre-war and post-war. Some even detail how much luggage they took with them, where they last lived and where they were going to live.

    All well and good.

    My question is this - Why are there no airline passenger lists? A.V. Roe started the first regular airline in the UK, linking Manchester, Southport and Blackpool on 1st May 1919. Granted that they were only internal flights, but international flights soon started - where passports had to be shown, before and after the flight. Passenger manifests must have existed. Why are they not available? It cannot be for confidentiality reasons - I can easily trace the fact that one of my married living uncles carried on an affair for two years, island hopping round the Pacific with his unmarried girlfriend. She gave birth on one voyage and the manifest was altered to take this into account. So if this kind of information is readily available from ship's manifests, why are airline manifests not available?

    Any ideas, anybody?

    Regards

    Kiltpin
    Whannell, Eaton and Jackson, in Scotland, India and England

    Dugdale, Ramm, Garrod, Taylor and Smith in Norfolk and Hull

  • #2
    I should think they were just thrown away, like ferry boat passenger lists or train journeys. Of little or no interest at the time, as opposed to shipping voyages. Even today, there are far fewer boat journeys than flights and it would be an utter logistical nightmare now to keep flight passenger lists - why would anyone do this and what would be the point (for the airline owners).

    OC

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    • #3
      Here's what the National Archives have to say on the subject

      Passenger lists are not held by The National Archives after 1960, when air travel became more common. No air passenger lists have survived.
      Last edited by annswabey; 22-09-15, 20:17.
      The National Archives, Kew – Research Service Offered
      Contact me via PM on Family Tree Forum or via my personal website - www.militaryandfamilyresearch.co.uk

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      • #4
        The Australian archives website has a few airline passenger lists online (arrivals at Perth airport between 1944 and 1964).

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Olde Crone Holden View Post
          I should think they were just thrown away, like ferry boat passenger lists or train journeys. Of little or no interest at the time, as opposed to shipping voyages. Even today, there are far fewer boat journeys than flights and it would be an utter logistical nightmare now to keep flight passenger lists - why would anyone do this and what would be the point (for the airline owners).

          OC
          Originally posted by annswabey View Post
          Here's what the National Archives have to say on the subject

          Passenger lists are not held by The National Archives after 1960, when air travel became more common. No air passenger lists have survived.
          Thanks, Mary, some interesting stuff there. Now to try and find some time to explore ...

          O C & Ann - the thing is, the lists have always been for the Customs and Immigration Service of the destination country, not for the carrier. So the airline or the shipping line would not have kept it anyway. I know that some lists still exist because about five years ago the police eliminated a suspect from their enquiries because they could prove that his plane was still in the air en-route to the Costa del Crime. In these days of electronic boarding passes, I am sure that some government department has them, but is not releasing them yet.

          Regards

          Kiltpin
          Whannell, Eaton and Jackson, in Scotland, India and England

          Dugdale, Ramm, Garrod, Taylor and Smith in Norfolk and Hull

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          • #6
            I've found flights of a step cousin going to & from Sweden in the '50s on Ancestry
            Last edited by PhotoFamily; 29-09-15, 01:43.

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            • #7
              I worked for UK immigration in the 1970s. I can confirm that passenger lists were created primarily for Customs & Immigration purposes, which is why there are none for domestic journeys. Even with international journeys, as far as the UK is concerned, they tended to be used on intercontinental journeys only. So there have never been any passenger lists for routes like Dover – Calais, or Harwich - Hook of Holland.

              Passenger lists had a variety of uses, partly for statistics, and partly to enable us to check names against various databases. With a big transatlantic liner they were also used for things like letting passengers disembark in batches (to reduce the queuing time), and to confirm all the passengers who travelled had actually been seen. And sometimes with cruise ships calling at obscure locations eg the Scilly Islands, where there is no routine immigration and customs facility, it enabled checks to be made in advance of the ship’s arrival. However little of this really applied at airports, where there were other ways of gathering the statistics and where passengers from all over the world just queued up together, so passenger lists weren’t really needed. (We mostly dispensed with them for flights in the early 1970s but they were still in use at some locations, especially seaports, right up until the 1980s. We had thousands of them at one time I can recall destroying them in batches every couple of years, to make space for new ones).

              So none around today for airlines, and any shipping lists for more recent years will all have been destroyed.

              As has been commented, nowadays advanced passenger information provides modern IT based solutions for obtaining the information needed. Any data gathered today is unlikely to be available to future generations because under various bits of legislation it can only be kept for an authorised purpose (eg national security or the prevention of crime), and then must be deleted when no longer required. So databases are set to automatically delete records after a certain period of time, assuming the individual has not otherwise come to adverse notice. So the vast majority of todays travel records will automatically vanish.

              Airlines have their own databases which nowadays contain quite detailed information (in order to comply with international requirements on the provision of advanced passenger information) and the police often use those records to trace a criminal’s movements. However those records are also subject to Data Protection provisions, and I suspect they’ll also be deleted after a certain period of time, in order to comply with the law in respect of retaining unnecessary private data.
              Elwyn

              I am based in Co. Antrim and undertake research in Northern Ireland. Please feel free to contact me for help or advice via PM.

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              • #8
                Thank you Elwyn - that's very useful information.

                jay
                Janet in Yorkshire



                Genealogists never die - they just swap places in the family tree

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