Don’t Forget To Check Out The Immigration Rolls

Unless you’re a full-blooded American Indian, your ancestors came from someplace other than the United States. And if you’re European or Asian, despite all the “pure blood” theories floating around, mixed ethnicities existed on those continents for almost a thousand years before people even knew there were Americas to be found!

When taken together, these facts can only mean one thing: we have far more ancestors than we can trace in one lifetime. Yet we can create a foundation upon which future generations may build by capturing what we can of the past.

When searching through U.S. immigration records it helps to know what country your family originated from but it isn’t always necessary. Lists were kept of people immigrating into the United States by their port of entry and by the name of ships upon which they sailed.

There were three main ports on the eastern U.S. seaboard where your ancestors could have landed: New York, Boston and Baltimore. But the main port for immigrants was always New York. Between 1830 and 1892, more than 10 million immigrants passed through CastleGarden (New York) and now, more than 73 million Americans can trace their ancestors to this place during this period. CastleGarden is known today as Castle Clinton National Monument and is a major landmark at The Battery, a waterfront park in Manhattan, N.Y.

CastleGarden served as America’s first actual immigration center, and was a joint project of the city and state. The “Garden” has records of thousands of immigrants microfilmed from original ship manifests that are available for view by visiting www.CastleGarden.org.

The year CastleGarden was closed, Ellis Island became the main port of entry for immigrants and between 1892 and 1924, more than 22 million immigrants passed through it.

In recent years, many volunteers, especially from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), helped in the effort to transcribe the Ellis Island records onto electronic public archives. The job of these countless volunteers not only consisted of transcribing the records, but of making sure the listings were transferred exactly as they were written, even if names were obviously misspelled.

Upon coming to America, many people “Anglican-ized” their names, sometimes right at the landing docks. At certain points in time, severe prejudices against various groups ran rampant, like the Irish experienced during the potato famine in 1697 and many Jews during the period leading up to World War II. And these things were sometimes the cause for changing a spelling of a surname as well.

Two books translated by Elizabeth Bentley in 1999 - Volume I, a 1,500-page document, and Volume II, of 1,160 pages, together list more than 150,000 immigrants from the CastleGarden and Ellis Island periods, giving whatever information was available in the original record. These entries often included first and last names, the country from which a person emigrated; stated destination and age. Bentley’s books, and CD ROMs containing similar information, have been categorized into lists of Germans; Irish; Italians; Russians; Dutch; Armenian; Czech; Greek; Luxembourg and Swedish individuals as well as lists containing those same names as part of passenger rosters on specific ships.

Immigration records may also be obtained from the National Archives, by visiting www.archives.gov/genealogy/immigration.

No matter how you decide to search for the ancestors that made the decision to immigrate, once they’re found, a whole new world of possibilities opens up across the sea. Living blood relations, you see, can be anywhere, and can be discovered along with ancestors at any stage of your search!