How to Identify Your Ancestral Ship

The following web sites provide information to aid you in your efforts to identify your ancestral ship.

Start here: Stephen P. Morse's Search Tools
Stephen P. Morse has created some exceptional tools for family history researchers. His easy-to-use Searching in One Step forms enable you to perform detailed searches of online databases for passengers and ships that came into Ellis Island, Castle Garden, Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In addition, his web site offers tools searching census and birth-marriage-death records, help with foreign languages, calendar converters and much more.This is one site you shouldn't miss!

CastleGarden.org
At CastleGarden.org, you have free access to an extraordinary database of information on 10 million immigrants from 1830 through 1892, the year Ellis Island opened. Over 73 million Americans can trace their ancestors to this early immigration period.

Ellis Island's American Family Immigration History Center
This searchable database includes information on the 17 million people who sailed past the Statue of Liberty into the Ellis Island complex between 1892-1924. You will be able to find your ancestor's name, ship name and port of origin, arrival date, gender, age on arrival, marital status, nationality and last residence.

National Archives Genealogy Page will familiarize you with the records maintained at the National Archives.



Information on Immigration and Emigration, Ships and Passenger Lists 

CIMO: Cimorelli Immigration Manifests Online. A wonderful web site for those trying to identify the ships of their ancestors, this includes a searchable version of the standard genealogical reference work, Morton Allan Directory of Passenger Arrivals 1890-1930. Search this database by the name of the ship, dates, ports of arrival, departure and more. 

Cyndi's List has links to a varied group of resources including mailing lists, libraries, museums and archives, publications, historical ships, passenger lists and more.

D'ADDEZIO.com, created by Illya James D'Addezio, is not just for those researching Italian, German or Greek roots (though you can do that, too!) Check out the index to passenger lists available on the web, as well as links to numerous helpful sites regarding passenger lists and ships.

Immigrant Ships page, created and maintained by Lou Alfano, has information on ships that are both well-known and lesser-known. An excellent resource for those interested in a ship's history, Lou has taken information that has been posted to ShipsList and archived it, listing the ships alphabetically by name. He also includes links to other ship-related pages.

Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild has transcriptions of thousands of passenger lists, with links to hundreds of ship- and immigration-related web sites.

Immigrants to Canada, created and maintained by Marj Kohli, is directed toward research of Canadian immigration, and includes hundreds of valuable links.

Immigration and Ships Passenger Lists Research Guide, created by Arnie Lang, has links to hundreds of websites of interest to those researching their ancestral ships. "The goal of this Guide is to help in research of immigration records and ship's passenger lists, both on-line and off-line. The emphasis is on helping those who may be new to this research, but it includes tips, links, and help that may be of interest to all."

LostLiners.com, created and maintained by Rob Betz, is an educational web site created to preserve the "Golden Age of Ocean Travel" and to ensure that the important role ocean liners have played history is not overlooked.

The ShipsList Newsgroup TheShipsList website, online since August 1999, will help you find your ancestors on ships' passenger lists. They also have immigration reports, newspaper records, shipwreck information, ship pictures, ship descriptions, shipping-line fleet lists and more, as well as hundreds of passenger lists to Canada, USA, Australia and South Africa.

The Norway Heritage Project is an extensive site which, while focusing on Norwegian emigration, provides historical information about hundreds of individual ships, numerous shipping lines, an index to transcribed passenger lists, links to important ship-related sites, and much more.

Last updated 18 Dec. 2008.

 


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