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Interested
in finding information about your immigrant ancestors? You're not alone.
Passenger lists are the most popular sources you can turn to in your efforts
to discover more facts about your immigrant forebears.
Several kinds of passenger lists exist: those created by officials
at the port of embarkation and at the port of arrival, and passenger
lists created by shipping companies. Often the same list, prepared by
the ship's crew, served the needs of port officials and shipping merchants.
Police and customs officials in ports of embarkation were required
by law to identify everyone leaving the port; passenger lists simplified
their work. Ships' owners, who sold space on board their ships, wanted
to ensure that only ticketed passengers were on their vessels. Officials
in the ports to which emigrant ships sailed wanted to admit only immigrants
who qualified under their immigration laws. These government agents
required that lists of passengers be filed with them before passengers
were allowed to disembark.
The keeping of passenger lists at United States ports of entry began
in 1820. Names of immigrants have been extracted from many of these
records and published in passenger lists' indexes. Such indexes normally
identify passengers by name, age, origin and ship.
The best-known indexing project is the Balch Institute-Temple University
Immigrant Archives in Philadelphia. Under the direction of Professor
Ira Glazier, Temple University students have extracted data from original
United States' customs and immigration passenger lists to produce several
indexes.
The Famine Immigrants (Ira Glazier, ed., Baltimore: Genealogical
Publishing, 1983) provides researchers with names of emigrants from
Ireland during the years of the potato famine, 1846-1851. The German
Emigrants (Ira Glazier, P. William Filby, eds. Wilmington, Del.:
Scholarly Resources, 1988-) is the largest index, with over 50 volumes
of emigrants who arrived after 1849. Italians to America, covering
immigrants arriving after 1879, (Ira Glazier, P. William Filby, eds.
Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992-) and Migration from
the Russian Empire (Ira Glazier, ed., Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing,
1995) are newer series indexing immigrant arrivals in the United States.
The Dutch emigration to the United States has been carefully documented
by Professor Robert P. Swieringa: Dutch Immigrants in U.S. Ship Passenger
Manifests, 1820-1880 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983).
What about indexes to passenger lists for the period prior to 1820?
P. William Filby, retired director of the Maryland State Historical
Society, has compiled a bibliography of the published passenger lists
he has discovered. You can find this under the title of Passenger
and Immigration Lists Bibliography, 1538-1900 (Detroit: Gale Research,
1984-).
Mr. Filby has indexed many of these lists in his Passenger and
Immigration Lists Index (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981) and Supplements
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1982-), which name about two and a quarter
million pre-1820 immigrants. For early immigrants arriving at the port
of Philidelphia, Mr. Filby has also published the index Philadelphia
Naturalization Records: An Index to Records of Aliens' Declarations
of Intention and/or Oaths of Allegiance, 1789-1880 (Detroit: Gale
Research, 1982).
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