Travel changed recently. It wasn't an alteration in the means of travel but an easing of restrictions so that travel was again possible. People are now taking off for different climes, something they'd been leery of until just recently. This change may be recent but it's also a reminder that the frequency of travel and ways of getting from place to place are by no means static; not now and not in the past. This was true for short journeys as well as epic immigrations.
My family's migrations are a case in point. They illustrate the changing means of transport as well as the altering length of journeys. I don't know much about the voyage of the first family immigrant. John Tripp made his way from Horkstow, Lincolnshire to Boston in the 1630s. Travel to North America from Britain was in its infancy. The ships were relatively small and the voyage itself was long. I have no idea what port he left from or where he landed. Was his travel all by ship or did he need to find a way to a faraway dock to catch an ocean going vessel? Once on a ship, travel times varied widely depending on wind and weather.
My knowledge of the first three immigrations in my family is sketchy. Travelling as early as he did, John Tripp would have come by sailing ship. The next two, the Mathesons and the Gilchrists came to North America in the 1840s and 1850s when steamships were being developed but they most likely still sailed across the Atlantic. Their ships would probably have been larger and faster than the one that came in the 1600s. I have been unable to find the two families who immigrated in the 1800s on any passenger lists.
That was not the case for the next immigrating family member. In 1911, H.S. Chambers was listed as sailing to St. John, New Brunswick on the Empress of Ireland. He travelled second class, no doubt in more luxurious surroundings than the two families of immigrants who had made the voyages decades earlier. I need to research his trip more thoroughly but, at least at this point, there is information to be sifted through.
You would think that record keeping would have improved as the years went by. But that was not the case. Yes, ships kept much better records of their passengers as time went on but that didn't transfer over to air travel. As you can see by the immigration table above, the last of my immigrating families came by plane rather than ship. No searchable records were kept of their arrival in Canada. So, from a research point of view it looks like things have gone full circle but thankfully travel time didn't go in the same direction.
Sources:
Campey, Lucille H. “Fast
Sailing and Copper-Bottomed: Aberdeen Sailing Ships and the Emigrant Scots They
Carried to Canada 1774-1855” Natural Heritage Books, Toronto, 2002
Douglas, Althea. Time
Traveller’s Handbook: A Guide to the Past Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2011
Images:
Postcard – Empress of Ireland - by Unknown - Sjöhistoriska museet, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42989236
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