Description

Official passenger lists for the port of Charleston--be they Customs Passenger Lists or State Department Transcripts--exist only for the years 1820-1829. This superb new work, compiled by expert South Carolina genealogist Brent Holcomb, captures this unique body of genealogical data on the several thousand people who managed to slip into Charleston through a relatively narrow window of time. Most were from Great Britain and Ireland, and most were young, most were male, and most were unskilled farmers and laborers. The lists themselves are arranged in the order in which they are found in the original, and all names in the lists are accessible by means of the name index at the back of the volume. The data in each entry, arranged in tabular format, is as follows: name of vessel, name of passenger, age, sex, date of arrival, occupation, where the passenger is from, country to which he belongs, and country which he intends to inhabit.