Discover your British ancestors who were born at sea between 1854 and 1960. Piece together your relative’s past from their full name, date of birth, and the vessel they were born on. Details like their father’s occupation or mother’s maiden name allow you to delve further back into previous generations.
Each record comprises a transcript of the original register. The amount of information listed varies, but the records usually include a combination of the following information about your ancestor:
• First name(s)
• Last name
• Birth year
• Birth date
• Father’s first name(s)
• Father’s last name
• Mother’s maiden name
• Vessel name
• Line number
The image may reveal further details, including:
• Time of birth
• Officiating minister at baptism
• Source of information
• Date child was re-registered
• Mother’s marital status
• Father’s rank or occupation
• Father’s nationality
• Father’s last residence
• Mother’s nationality
• Mother’s last residence
The record set comprises 25,835 records. The record set contains records from the following series:
Births from the Chatham Division of the Royal Marines 1830 - 1913
Births of British and foreign passengers and seamen between 1891 and 1972.
Births at sea, Falmouth 1892 - 1918 (these birth records are just added to Cust67 death records)
This series contains registers of the births of passengers between 1854 and 1890 compiled from ships' official logs of births, deaths and marriages of passengers at sea by the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen and its predecessor.
Several births are recorded on the ill-fated RMS Lusitania, which went on to be torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, killing 1,198 passengers and crew.
The records include births of the children of passengers, seamen, and Royal Marines, of both British and other nationalities. Some of the records contain notes about conditions surrounding the birth, such as premature confinement, if the child was stillborn, if the mother was unmarried.
Asian laborers (known as coolies)
The ‘Rank, Profession or Occupation of Father’ field can reveal not only the father’s occupation but whether the family are immigrants. There are also references to ‘Coolies’, (also spelled ‘Cooly’) a label used for Asian (mostly Indian and Chinese) laborers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the abolition of the slave trade, labor-intensive industries in the colonies were left with no cheap source of manpower, so a large-scale trade in Asian indentured laborers began to replace slavery in the 1820s. The British were the first to try out this form of cheap labor in 1807, when they imported a couple of hundred Chinese men to work in Trinidad. Famines, wars, and land shortages led to many Asians choosing to go abroad in search of a better life. Many Coolies were voluntary workers, but there were noted cases of kidnappings and hiring under false pretenses.
Civil registration was introduced in 1837 in England and Wales, and in 1855 in Scotland. Since then, details of births at sea aboard British-registered ships were required to be sent to the relevant General Register Office. Until 1874, these details were sent directly by the ship’s captain; after that date, they were sent through the Registrar-General of Shipping and Seamen. The primary record of a birth at sea is the ship’s official documentation. This is usually the ship’s official log (which was introduced in 1851) but until the early 1890’s, can be located on the back of crew lists, including those of passengers. This information was taken by the Registrar-General of Shipping and Seamen and entered in registers currently found at The National Archives.