For the first time, the passenger records for every person who embarked on a long-distance ocean-liner journey between 1890 and 1960 have been released online – and there are many famous names among them.

Stars including actors Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, film director Alfred Hitchcock and playwright Noel Coward can all be found among the lists of people setting out for new lives in the 1940s and 1950s.

Elizabeth Taylor's journey to New York with her American parents in 1934, when she was aged two is listed as is the passenger list for the Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage in 1912.

Local names of notoriety, including wealthy businessman and philanthropist Sir James Reckitt who travelled to America to escape Hull's pollution, and Muriel Wilson, daughter of Hull's leading shipping family in the late 19th century can also be found.

Family history website findmypast.com has worked in association with the National Archives to digitally reproduce 164,000 original passenger lists from long-distance voyages.

A team of 125 worked for more than a year to complete the project.

In all, there are 1.1 million pages now on the internet which list 24 million passengers.

Highlights include a sailing by the Normandie from Southampton on November 5, 1938, taking Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Anna Neagle and Nöel Coward to New York.

Parts of the archive have been online since last year but yesterday's addition of records from the 1950s marks the end of the project.

Findmypast.com's commercial director, Elaine Collins, said: "The availability of the passenger lists from ships that left British ports in the 1950s is an invaluable tool for people tracing relatives they believe may have left the UK during this period.

"The passenger records may very well provide a missing link for many family historians who have hit a brick wall in their research, as well as helping those outside of the UK to trace back to their British and European heritage."

During the 1950s, 1,912 people departed from Hull docks. "The figure seems quite low because the passenger lists that were kept by the Board of Trade were concerned with long-haul voyages and Hull was more important for intra-European traffic, which was not recorded. People emigrating from Yorkshire would have been more likely to have travelled from Liverpool, particularly for US and Canada, or Southampton, which although less convenient, was the main gateway for the larger passenger ships", Mrs Collins said.

It is thought that Muriel Wilson, famous for being a pillar of Hull society, travelled from Southampton to New York, where her arrival was covered by the New York Times. She was married by that time, but Winston Churchill proposed to her in her younger years.

Every ship's passenger record contained the names of each traveller, and the dates and ports of departure and destination.

The UK address, year of birth, marital status, occupation and nationality of each passenger also feature in the typed or hand-written records.

The top 10 most popular occupations among emigrants to Australia in the 1950s were clerks, typists or secretaries (28,873 passengers), domestic staff (17,235), medical sector (14,953), farming (14,247), labourers (13,373), teachers or lecturers (9,292), factory workers (8,925), engineers (5,931), fitters (5,099) and carpenters (5,027).

The decade also saw 17,385 retired people emigrating from the UK, and 140,511 women described as "housewives" in the historic documents..

Dr Nicholas Evans from the University of Hull and an expert in the area of migration said: "These records are really useful, having worked through the original documents myself, I know it used to take forever.

"Now people can search for information about their ancestors in their own home," he continued.

"It's a fantastic resource."