Vagrant Passes 1801-1835 (England to Ireland)

[MaryA]

Glancing down the New Additions to Ancestry, I came across this heading and of course threw in a name just to see what it was all about. The heading to the page opened was

"Account of Poor Persons conveyed from the Port of Liverpool to Ireland"

Never have come across this before, has anybody else?

Would it be like Removal Orders do you think? would these people have been Irish and come to England only to still be on their uppers and returned to their original home?

[Bertieone]

Anc offers this explanation,


About Lancashire, England, Vagrant Passes, 1801-1835




The burden of relief for the poor fell to parishes, so to keep their outlays at a minimum, English parishes kept a close eye on migration. The Poor Law Act of 1601 restricted the burden of relief for paupers to their parish of “settlement,” and several subsequent Settlement Acts defined who had the right to settlement in a parish. While the laws changed over the years, place of birth, steady employment or apprenticeship for some length of time, marriage, owning or renting property of £10 per annum or more, holding an office in the parish, or paying the parish rate were criteria used to determine right of settlement.

Individuals (or families) deemed vagrants could be transported back to their parish of settlement. Anyone able to support themselves or their family who neglected to do so was considered a vagrant, as were unlicensed peddlers, prostitutes, beggars, fortune-tellers, the homeless, gamblers, and criminals.

This collection includes lists of people being transported back to their place of settlement in Ireland. Lancashire received more than their share of Irish immigrants, as other parishes often passed them to Lancashire to be shipped back to Ireland from Liverpool. Soldiers and sailors returning from wars often returned home and found themselves being passed back to their parishes of settlement, and you’ll find the names of many of them, as well as their wives and children, included in these records.

The lists varied somewhat over the years, but in general they included the name of the vagrant, date shipped, description (e.g., vagrant, discharged soldier, soldier's widow, etc.), whether accompanied by a wife and child(ren), number of passes (per family), allowances and expenses, and the name of the ship. In some cases, they also listed the parish from which the vagrant was passed.

[MaryA]

Thank you Bert, could be a very valuable resource for those with Irish ancestry, wish the databased spanned more years.

[Bertieone]

Came across this, further help and info may be available.

Note that poor law removals of Irish folk from Britain can also be found in lists on the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers website at http://parlipapers.chadwyck.com (accessible through subscribing institutions, including the National Library of Scotland's Licensed Digital Collections at https://auth.nls.uk/ldc/), with some also freely available from the 1860s and 1870s on Raymond's County Down website at www.raymondscountydownwebsite.com.

[MaryA]

Some interesting reading although I didn't manage to get into the HCPP records, and for anybody trying to access with their library cards, Liverpool don't seem to know anything about it but Lancashire Library think you could access it from their own terminals, not from home.