RESEARCH

Archive Project Of Emigrants Leaving From The Port Of Genoa
Registers of Maritime Health of the Port of Genoa kept in the State Archive of Genoa (1833 – 1852).

Work in progress
March 2008

 

The purpose of the researches developed in this project is to create a data base that contains names and other information about people leaving the Port of Genoa, as point of departure for Italian and foreign emigrants with any destination in the world.

The study takes into consideration passenger traffic coming from Italy and continental Europe in the period: 1833 – 1852.

The investigation is focused on the “Registers of Maritime Health” kept in the Genoa State Archive .

As first approximation, the information has been structured in the following areas:
Data for the identification of the document: Institute of conservation, fund, series, archivistic unity, register number, passport number, register pages, register sentences, date of sentence or passport, year.
Identificative elements of the person: surname, name, sex, date of birth, age, paternity, motherhood, patronymic, place of birth, province / birth nation date of registration (day, month, year), profession / status as indicated, last residence, place of destination, name and kind of ship, name and surname of the ship captain, ship flag, decision of the draft board.
Annotations: notes, notes as indicated
Identificative datum of the card: initial operator, date of editing

The boarding lists which are the primary source of the research can be consulted on original paper support starting from the year 1833 .
In the course of the present pilot stage of the project, we have recorded 2.500 complete records, with about 90.000 information. The aim is to implement the data base by means of the current activities.
The voyages which are related are referred to local, national and international destinations.

The most interesting phenomenons with respect to the people are the following: middle/young age; preponderance of the male sex; main place of birth localized in the Regno di Sardegna (nowadays the north west of Italy and Sardinia); remarkable even the ones coming from France, Great Britain, Germany, etc. The main places of destination are Gibraltar (in transit for the Atlantic Ocean), North, Centre and South America, as well as the Italian ports in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Nice and Marseilles.
Regarding Ships: medium-small size, historic typologies about which it is necessary to do some thorough examinations to check the types of courses where they were used at the time. The name of the ship is useful to check the frequency of the landings in the port of Genoa and eventually show the liner traffic. The commonest ship flag is the Sardinian one. The identification of the Captain allows to cross the data together with the survey concerning the study on the nautical log-books.

By Francesca Carminati

The project has been planned by Prof.ssa Adele Maiello of the Scientific Committee of CISEI.