Old passport records

Given the dates it couldn't have been an Irish passport, so I think National Archives UK (Kew) would be the place to check. Very few people had passports and for most of the usual destinations he wouldn't have needed one anyway - e.g. UK, US, Australia, Canada etc.

edit : I seem to remember an older 'passport' turning up on one research items on the Genealogy Roadshow TV programs on RTE...

I'm interested in finding out more about Irish passports in general from 1922 (or would it be 1937 or even 1949?) to the 1960s. Anyone have info?

There were def. Free State passports from the 1920s - I have my Grandad's dated 1924, which he got for a trip to Canada via the US.

Yeah, Ancestry has U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925.

He might have become a U.S. citizen and got the passport to ensure getting back into the U.S. after visiting Ireland?

Also, maybe there are other passport record databases on other sites. That is the one I am aware of.

The meaning of the word "passport" has changed over the years. As the word itself suggests, it was orginally a document which allowed goods (and, later, persons, to pass through a port, and it was generally issued by the port authorities, or by some higher level of government. In this sense, it was a lot closer to the modern concept of "visa"; if you wished to travel in, say, France, and were not a French subject, the "passport" you needed would be issued by the French authorities. So you didn't get a passport from your own government, but from the government(s) of the place(s) in which you wished to travel.

Some governments imposed restrictions on citizens/subjects leaving the country (or, occasionally, on citizens/subjects travelling within the country) and if you lived under one of those governments then you might need a passport from your own government in order to start your journey. This is the origin of the modern sense of "passport". If you got a passport from your own government authorising you t leave, that passport would also serve to identify you to the foreign governments in whose countries you were travelling, and a practice grew up that they wouldn't issue you with the necessary travel documentation unless you produced your home country passport, and that instead of issuing you with a separate document they would put a stamp or note in your home country passport, confirming your right to travel in their country. This was called a visa, Latin for "seen", meaning that it was a confirmation that the authorities of the country you were visiting had seen the identifcation/travel document issued by your home country, and were happy with it.

Until the twentieth century, passports were quite rare. You would get a passport from your home country and, quite often, from your host country, if you were travelling on official business, or if you were a person of status who might want to invoke the assistance of the authorities in the country you were visiting. But most people did not need or get passports for international travel. Up to 1914 you could go from Dublin to Rome, or Lisbon, or Berlin, by boat and train without needing a passport. Only if you were travelling to Russia or Turkey would you need a passport.

No passport was required to enter the US until 1875 - there were no immigration controls of any kind. (And even after 1875, many people could and did enter the US without a passport.) But in 1864, when the American Civil War was on, there may well have been requirements that travellers have some kind of identification or documentation - or, at any rate, conditions might have made that advisable. But passports were issued by the US government only to US citizens. Anyone who got a US passport in 1860 was a US citizen, unless the record concerned was using "passport" in the looser sense of any kind of permission-to-enter or permission-to-travel-internally document that the US authorities may have been issuing during the war.