Early Newspaper Shipping Arrivals & Departures
Early newspapers provide some of the only Departure records for Port Jackson / Sydney, as very few original departure records have survived. The information presented here has been indexed from the Shipping columns of the Shipping Gazette and Sydney General Trade List, The Bee and The Omnibus and Sydney Spectator.
Source: The National Library of Australia, as part of the Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project, 1840-45, has on their website digitised copies of Australian Periodical Publications 1840-1845. The Gazette provides some fascinating reading, including things maritime, amongst them wrecks, legal actions, even the arrest of a vessel, and traded goods including boxes of sea horse tongues.
The Shipping Gazette and Sydney General Trade List has been preserved, and extends from Volume 1, no. 1 (Saturday, Mar. 23, 1844) to Volume 17, no. 869 (Monday, Dec. 31, 1860); the online collection covers Volume 1 to Volume 12, Number 608 (31 December, 1855). The remaining years of publication are available on fiche at major libraries and Genealogical Societies.
I wish you well with your research and hope you find at least one of your ‘missing’ among these pages.
Every care possible has been taken with these records but, as usual, remember to check original sources of everything for yourself.