If you are a genealogist in the United States—the great melting pot of the world—chances are that somewhere along your family history you will find yourself in need of immigration records. Immigration records refer to any sort of record relating to an ancestor’s immigration, such as border crossing records and passport records, but the record most often sought by researchers are ship passenger lists.
What are Passenger Lists?
For a long period of time, immigrants to the United States arrived mainly by ship. These ships would often have manifests, or passenger lists, which were created by the ship’s captain or the ship’s company and which contained a list of the ship’s passengers. Such passenger lists may also be called ship passenger arrival records.
Starting in 1820, it became federally mandated that the captain of a ship arriving from a foreign country provide a list containing the names of all passengers arriving aboard the ship. Thus, many passenger lists are available through the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); even dates before 1820, there are many publications that contain such records. Thus, searching for passenger lists is an important and often fruitful process in family history research.
Information on Immigration Records: How to Use Passenger Lists for Genealogy Research
Passenger lists are valuable for genealogy research not only because they are records of an immigrant ancestor’s entry into the United States, but also because they can contain other precious information for family tree research. Immigration records can contain, in addition to the passenger’s name, the passenger’s profession, nationality, place of last residence, age, and names and address of relatives who they will be staying with in the United States.
All of these are vital clues to putting together the life of an ancestor, and also may provide hints for how to find other records of interest. For example, knowing the names and address of an immigrant ancestor’ s relatives will not only unearth other members of the family tree, but will also provide a location for searching for later records of that immigrant ancestor.
In addition, U.S. immigrations officials often added annotations to ship passenger lists, and these too may be used to further family history research by providing extra information or by providing references to other related records, such as naturalization records. For example, “USB” or “USC” indicates that the passenger was a U.S. citizen returning from a foreign country. This may be useful in eliminating a candidate from a list of possible immigrant ancestors—obviously, “Al Hirsch” who arrived from Germany on June 18, 1934 is not an immigrant ancestor if he was a U.S. citizen, so a genealogist might turn instead to “Alfred Hirsch” who arrived a month later.
Where to Find Immigration Records
As mentioned, the National Archives is a good resource for finding passenger lists starting from 1820 until the mid to late 1900’s. These passenger lists are organized by port and, although the lists themselves are not available online, it is possible to see online what microfilm is available for each port. If you know the exact record, it is also possible to order copies of passenger lists online for the years 1820-1959. Finally, they also hold other types of immigration records, such as Canadian and Mexican border crossing records.
Even for records prior to 1820, there are many published indexes. One of the largest is Filby’s Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, which covers the 17th to the 18th centuries. Of course, there are many other indexes, and these can be found in various libraries with large genealogy collections.
Finally, the website of the American Family Immigration History Center on Ellis Island is also a great resource, although its coverage is limited to records of arrivals at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924. It not only provides scanned images of passenger lists online, but it also makes the search for your ancestor effortless, with an intuitive search engine that also provides nine facts about each passenger returned in the results.
Immigration is a momentous event in your family history—it marks the passage of your family heritage from one country to another. Especially with the abundance of resources available for finding immigration records, it is well worth the effort to find the passenger list of your immigrant ancestor in your family history research.
