Why we don't exactly know who was aboard

Although we generally have a good idea, and an even better idea as research continues, there are no extant definitive lists. There are many reasons for this:

• Records were sporadic and not thoroughly created in the first place. e.g. “J. Smith, wife and 2 children.”

• Records were lost, here and in the UK, through misfortune or negligence

• Many records were under the auspices of the SA Company, rather than the colonial government.

• People changed their names between the time they applied and when they landed.

• Misspellings, through sloppiness, illiteracy, or phonetic spelling.

• Illegible writing.

• Transcription errors as records were copied.

• People swapped ships between application and sailing.

• Crew members were recorded as emigrants (to swell the statistics).

• Emigrants were recorded as crew members.

• Some crew members decided to stay on, or sailed away only to come back to settle at a later date.

• Some unhappy emigrants caught the first boat out (via Hobart, King George Sound, or Sydney) back to their motherland or elsewhere, and no subsequent trace is found of them apart from their original application to emigrate.

• Later newspaper accounts, suffered from severe accuracy lapses, either by the journalist or the interviewee, – people attributed to arriving in 1836 when it was actually a year or three later!

Frankly, there were better records made and managed of the convicts in the other colonies.