Hello! Welcome to a new series that I’m doing where I plan every other Sunday to post a short post on some sort genealogical resource that I think will be helpful to all of you. Now most of these will focus one way or another on Jewish records, but that doesn’t mean some of these won’t be helpful non-Jewish genealogical research as well!
The resource
This Sunday’s resource is the Ellis Island website which has passenger lists from Ellis Island, and other ports across the East Coast of the US.
First thing you do is enter the name of who you’re trying to find, you should be able to find the name they immigrated under in the naturalization records, which you can find on Ancestry, FamilySearch, or various other websites.
Next you go down to the advanced search where you can filter by sex, birth year, arrival year, last residence, and arrival location. Now I will just warn you if the only record you have of their arrival date is censuses I would filter for a broad range as many times arrival dates in censuses are off by quite a few years.
Finally is the ship name filter which again you should be able to find from any naturalization records you have on the person. I would recommended trying several different spellings if the first try doesn’t show up any results as many times the names of ships were misspelled, and the ORC which is the technology indexing the ships names can misread those misspelling which can lead to a bit of a mess.
Thanks for reading this post! I know it’s fairly short but these Resource Sundays are gonna be like it, with them just being a quick preview of various resources.
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