After searching online for the PARNELL family without success At 14:16 20-09-01 +1000, jmhogan wrote: >Dear Ada Ackerly, Thank you so much, I had been told they arrived on a ship >called Elizabeth, but could not find any record of it arriving at the right >time. I am so very grateful to you for finding and sending the information >about them to me. >Who holds these records for assisted immigrants? and is it possible to get >details on other members of my family? Hello Maree, The records are held by the Victorian Public Record Office The unassisted immigrants were indexed many years ago by Marjorie Morgan, placed on cards and given to the VPRO. Unfortunately, over the years, researchers who were too lazy to write down the information, stole the card with their surname (and containing the names of others on other ships possibly not related to them) and did not return them. As the work was done on donated cards, information was both on the front and the back. In the 1980s it was decided that these cards should be filmed and placed on microfiche for research rooms. So the surviving cards were filmed (fronts only) and microfiched. They were very hard to read in the purple print then used. Late 1980s it was decided to produce a typed index from the cards, film all the passenger lists and produce a set "Assisted Immigrants", index & shipping lists The cards were sent to an outside service and the surviving cards were transcribed. The index was produced and, before issue it was found that one drawer of cards had not been included. The index was discarded, the missing drawer of cards included, and published. It included the original (surviving) shipping lists, some nominal lists and some showing disposal of passengers with names of employers. At the time the set was very expensive and I believe were only supplied on pre-order. As you can see, the index is flawed: Cards of some surnames, having been stolen, could not be transcribed The outsourced secretarial transcribers only typed from the fronts of the cards, ommitting the names on the backs of the cards Being a re-transcription, there is an opportunity for more errors. So.... active & professional researchers know the flaws in this index, and there is a group of experienced people re-indexing from the original records to catch all those missing from the previously published index, and it will be re-issued at some future date. It takes a long time, with checking, to produce such an index. Years of work by the team. This means, of course, that non-appearance in the index does not mean there is no record. It means that one cannot guarantee to find the person sought, if they were listed on the back of a card or were listed along with others of the same surname, on a card a researcher decided was their property, and made it unavailable to others. So, no certainty, but I could check the index for the names you seek. regards, Ada Ackerly, Melbourne, Australia formerly Ackerly DocuSearch