Online database shows Britain-Australia links

Details of millions of Britons who travelled to Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century in search of economic success were released online Wednesday as part of a social history collection.

Website Ancestry.co.uk has compiled the names of 8.9 million so-called "free settlers", or economic migrants to Australia, including around 2.2 million British free settlers.

According to the website, around 16 million Britons have an ancestor who was a free settler, meaning that the average Briton has approximately a one-in-four chance of descending from an economic migrant to Australia.

The website did not immediately provide figures for the number of Australians descended from free settler migrants from Britain.

Also included in the collection, along with British economic migrants, are international travellers from the around the world, and their crew members, but breakdowns were not provided of the number of migrants from other countries.

"Australia's free settler heritage is often overlooked in favour of its more colourful convict past," the website's managing director Simon Harper said.

"However, it should be remembered that free settlers were brave and ambitious, making the choice to leave their homes and travel by ship for many months to the other side of the world for the chance of a new life."

Australia's population rose more than 100 times between 1826 and 1922, largely due to immigration, as well as a rapidly-growing economy.

The website's collection shows that Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Sydney in 1893, a year before he died, and that actress Nicole Kidman is a descendant of Irish settlers Bridget and James Callacher.

© 2008 AFP

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