The eGGSA Passenger List Project

The eGSSA branch of the Genealogical Society of South Africa has embarked on a project to transcribe all the passenger lists in the South African Archives that the archivists can find for us and some wonderful information has been found at the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository and at the Roeland Street Archives, Cape Town. We thank both of these Archive Repositories and their staff for their help in making these documents available to us and thus to you..

The Passenger List Project transcription is co-ordinated by Richard Wolfaardt. The transcriptions are being done by a handful of volunteers without whom this project could not be carried out. Due to agreements signed with the archives, we will only be publishing the transcribed data and not the original images.

So far transcribed are the Natal Immigration Board's lists of immigrants 1850 to 1911 (for more details please see  Immigration Records in the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository ) and the series IPC 6 ,  twenty passenger lists of ships from an Emigration scheme of 1859-1864 and the series KAB PWD 2-401 to 420 from 1873 to 1884 and PWD 2-756 from 1884-1885 ( for more details of these see Passenger lists in the Western Cape Archives ).

Trisha MacLeod has been transcribing passenger lists from a number of 19th Century Publications. The following are searchable in this database:
The British Mail (a monthly newspaper) lists of departures from British ports 1879 to 1881
The Colonies & India (a weekly newspaper 1883 to 1888.

Allan Beeby has contributed transcriptions of four notices of new arrivals which he has transcribed from the newspaper The Cape of Good Hope Exchange Gazette which appears to have been published in Cape Town between 1850 and 1851 - these are the immigrant lists for the ships Dalhousie, Zenobia and Collingwood in 1850 and the Diadem in 1851.

Photography of the passenger lists in the Western Cape Archives is continuing and more transcriptions will be added.

Also being photographed  are the passengers lists that were published in the Cape Town Gazette and Government Gazette.

 We are also hoping to identify other primary sources, in order to expand the database.