How to Find a Ship's Immigrant Passenger List
Often, people hit a roadblock in personal genealogy research when looking for when and where their families crossed into America from their native lands. This is because you must find the specific passenger information for the ship your family traveled on and confirm your ancestors' passage on that ship. Finding these records is the single most important step in tracing a family from America to their old country. These ship records hold a wealth of information, including the port your ancestors departed from, their age, their occupation, their American arrival date and more.
- Difficulty:
- Moderately Challenging
Instructions
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Trace your family back to the point when they immigrated to the United States. Use census information to gather the correct spelling of their names and who they might have been traveling with.
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Pay special attention to stories passed down through the family. Often they contain valuable information, including where ancestors might have sailed from or where they arrived. For example, perhaps you have heard that your great-great-great-grandfather entered the country at Ellis Island. This is valuable information.
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Make a list of possible entrance points and a range of years during which your family may have entered the country. For example, you might believe that your ancestors entered either through New York or Boston between the years of 1863 and 1865.
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Decide what kind of record you need to search for. Before 1820 there was no government regulation of immigration records. What records do exist often simply list people's names as part of the cargo. This is also true of those who came to the country as slaves after 1820. Immigration passenger lists from 1820 on are often not indexed but can be located by the name of the ship and the port of call.
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Check the website of the immigration location you believe your family passed through. Ellis island and Castle Gardens, for example, have made all of their records for all passengers between 1820 and 1957 available electronically.
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Search genealogy websites. These are less specific and can be harder to wade through, but they are also more complete. They allow you to search a broader spectrum if you have a less concrete idea of where and when your family crossed over. For example, Ancestry.com lists the immigration records from the 1820s on for many ports of call.
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Contact the Church of Latter Day Saints and contract with a genealogical expert to research for you, or arrange to go to one of their genealogy research sites and look through the microfiche of passenger logs yourself. The Church of Latter Day Saints owns the largest and most in-depth genealogical archive available in the United States. They are often able to find specific records of your family when you hit a brick wall in your own research.
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References
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