Here's a piece of seriously obscure Lewis trivia... In Brothers and Friends Warnie describes his voyage back from Shanghai via Japan, San Francisco and New York, on a ship called the Tai Yin. Having a couple of hours spare, I thought I would dig around for info on the ship and the voyage (as I was vaguely aware that passenger shipping is one thing about which there is a lot of information on the Web). I found a couple of things, firstly this one; and , .
Secondly, and more amazingly, on Ancestry.com ('fraid you have to subscribe to this one), under their Passenger Lists section, they have a scanned image of the U.S. Immigration docket for the Tai Yin when she called at San Francisco in 1930 with Warnie on board. Unfortunately, Warnie's details are not on the docket as he wasn't disembarking at San Franscisco, but there are the details of one of the travelling companions he mentions in Brothers and Friends. Sadly, the lists don't cover quite the same period of time for New York, so I couldn't find any record of Warnie's arrival at New York (where he transshipped to a Cunard liner for Liverpool). But isn't it amazing that this level of detail is on the 'Net at all? I guess people go to the trouble mainly because US citizens want to track back their origins in Europe...
