An Act of Congress passed on 2 March 1819, called An Act to Regulate Passenger Ships and Vessels, required masters of ships arriving at American ports from abroad to submit a list of all ships' passengers to the Collector of the customs district in which the ship arrived. These lists-- Customs Passenger Lists--were collected at all ports of entry from 1820 onwards, and they mark the beginning of official U.S. immigration records. The Act called for a strict enumeration or listing of all ships' passengers--cabin and steerage passengers, immigrants and non-immigrants--and was thus the mechanism for an epic documentation. Well into the 1890s, Customs Passenger Lists furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of nearly twenty million persons. With the single exception of federal census records they are the largest, the most continuous, and the most uniform body of records of the entire century.

Under the 1819 Act, ships' masters were required to deliver a list, or manifest, indicating each passenger's name, age, sex, occupation, and the country to which he belonged, the country which he intended to inhabit, the name of his ship, his port of embarkation, and the date of his arrival. The lists were kept under the authority of the collectors of the customs at the various ports of entry and were subsequently deposited with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Eventually they were acquired by the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where they were sorted and arranged by port, date, and ship, and then microfilmed.

Arranged chronologically by port of entry and only partially indexed, these Customs Passengers Lists are somewhat hard to use, even for the early years at the port of New York, where, for example, the existing National Archives index is based on a card index to copies of the original passenger lists rather than an index to the original lists themselves. This compilation by Mrs. Bentley, however, goes a long way to rectifying this situation, as it is a direct transcription of the original microfilmed lists (National Archives Microfilm #237) for the port of New York during the time period 1820 through 1829.

The majority of the passengers arriving in New York at this time were of British or Irish origin (occasionally listed by place of nativity rather than country to which they belonged), and proof of their arrival can be found in no other immigration records of the period. Indeed, this publication is itself utterly unique, and it is not available on CD or in any printed form but this. Here, then, in this one encyclopedic volume are the names of 85,454 passengers with their age, sex, occupation, origin, etc., and the names of the 6,247 ships that brought them to New York. (As a matter of interest, the book contains a separate list of ships with the names of ship masters, ports of embarkation, and dates of arrival.)

Until now these passenger lists have been virtually inaccessible, and no other publication has offered information on this particular group of immigrants. Anyone interested in early 19th-century records, therefore, could do no better than to begin his research here.

Starting in 1820, ships' passenger lists were collected by U.S. Customs officials at all ports of entry. Well into the 1890s, these lists--Customs Passenger Lists--furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of nearly twenty million persons. With the exception of federal census records, they are the largest and most continuous body of records of the entire century.

Listing each passenger by name, age, sex, occupation, the country he intended to inhabit, the name of his ship, his port of embarkation, and the date of his arrival, the lists were kept under the authority of the collectors of customs at the various ports of entry, later deposited with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and finally given to the National Archives, where they were sorted and arranged by port, date, and ship, and then microfilmed.

The microfilm version of the Customs Passenger Lists for the port of New York--by far the busiest port of entry in the U.S.--consists of both original passenger lists and copies of those lists, depending on which list was most suitable for microfilming. This compilation by Mrs. Bentley, a sequel to her recent book covering the period 1820-1829, is a direct transcription of the original microfilmed lists (National Archives Microfilm #237) for the port of New York for the period 1830 through 1832.

In this one encyclopedic volume are the names--in alphabetical order--of 65,000 passengers with their age, sex, occupation, place of origin, etc., and the names of the 1,700 ships that brought them to New York. Also included is a separate list of ships with the names of ship masters, ports of embarkation, and dates of arrival.Until now these passenger lists have been virtually inaccessible, available only through a somewhat incomplete card index maintained by the National Archives. Along with the first volume in this series, we now have complete coverage of passengers arriving at the port of New York for the entire period from 1820 through 1832.

The Irish-American, a weekly newspaper published in New York City for the edification of the Irish immigrant population, began publication in August 1849, at the height of the great exodus from Ireland. Besides news items of interest to the Irish community, the paper ran a popular classified section for people seeking information on relatives and friends who had recently taken up residence in the U.S. These classified ads appeared in a column entitled "Information Wanted," and because of their genealogical value they have been transcribed in their entirety for this publication. The ads are of particular importance to the genealogist because they usually indicate the Irish county, townland, or parish from which an immigrant came, and virtually all Irish genealogical research is based on the identification of these jurisdictions.

In addition to naming former places of residence in Ireland, the ads often name places of residence in the U.S., provide names and relationships of family members, give dates of departure from Ireland and arrival in the U.S., indicate ships' names, and sometimes specify ages and occupations. To help the researcher use this data efficiently, the compilers have assembled five separate indexes: Personal Names, Irish Place Names, United States Place Names, Other Places, and New York City Streets. Altogether, some 8,500 names appear in the Personal Names index alone; and there are references to several thousand place names.

The following ad is typical, and shows what a wealth of data awaits the researcher:

January 30, 1869

Of Patrick Colman, boot and shoemaker, son of Michael Colman, boot and shoemaker, of Flemings Place, Baggot Street Bridge, DUBLIN, formerly of DONNYBROOK. He sailed from the North Wall, Dublin, for New York, in the ship Ashland, about nineteen years ago. Any information of him will be thankfully received by his sister, Mary Ann Colman, by writing to John McKeon, 136 Market Street, Newark, N.J.

Although it is difficult to estimate the figure accurately, experts believe that 100,000 Scots emigrated to the United States or Canada during the middle of the nineteenth century. The majority of these emigrants were skilled, educated workers from urban industrial backgrounds whose expertise was in great demand in the rapidly industrializing cities of North America. For this book, David Dobson, who has previously published the most extensive lists of Scottish immigrants to America during the colonial and early Federal periods in print, extends his coverage of Scottish immigration to the period 1825-1875. For the most part, his findings come from Scottish newspapers like the Aberdeen Journal, Fife Advertiser, Scottish Guardian, etc. as well as from a handful of documents in the Scottish Record Office and other archives. The Scottish expatriates identified by the compiler are arranged alphabetically and invariably give, besides the individual's full name, place of residence (country, state/province, or city), an identifying date, and the source of the information. In addition, many of the entries indicate the individual's date of birth, father's name and occupation or place of residence, spouse, or the name of the vessel upon which he arrived. In all Mr. Dobson has culled information on upwards of 2,000 Scotsmen who were residing in North America during the early Victorian era.

Nineteenth-century emigration from Scotland to the U.S. was the continuation of a process that had its roots in the seventeenth century. Unlike the majority of European emigrants, who represented surplus rural workers from an agrarian society, the Scottish emigrants of the Victorian period were skilled, educated workers from urban industrial backgrounds whose expertise was in great demand in the rapidly industrializing cities of North America. Between 1825 and 1838, more than 60,000 emigrants left Scotland bound for North America; from 1840 to 1853, nearly 30,000 emigrated from there; and in 1881 alone, 38,000 left for the United States and 3,000 left for Canada, mostly via Greenock.

The sixth installment in David Dobson's Scots in the USA and Canada, 1825-1875 endeavors to identify, in the absence of official Scottish passenger lists to North America, as many as possible of the Scottish men, women, and children who took part in this great migration. Containing about 1,500 sketches not found in the prior books, Part Six brings the total number of passenger sketches to nearly 10,000.

Dr. Dobson's findings come from primary sources in Scotland and North America. The newest book in the series attributes a number of contemporary newspapers and archives, including the Inverness Journal and Quebec City Gazette and the Scottish Catholic Archives and Delaware State Archives, respectively. Researchers will find a list of references at the back of each book.

Dr. Dobson has arranged these expatriates alphabetically in each Part and, while the descriptions vary, he gives the individual's full name, place of residence in North America (country, state/province, or city), an identifying date, and the source of the information. In addition, many of the entries indicate the individual's date of birth, father's name and occupation or place of residence, spouse, or the name of the vessel upon which he or she arrived.

The blight that struck the Irish potato crop in the winter of 1845-46 brought ruin to tens of thousands of tenant farmers and laborers, reducing almost all of Ireland to poverty and, as a result, people had the choice of leaving Ireland or perishing. So, between 1846 and 1851, more than a million men, women and children emigrated to the United States and Canada, mostly through the port of New York.

The information on these people exists in an invaluable series of port arrival records, the Customs Passenger Lists. Unpublished and only partially indexed, these records have been studied and the result is The Famine Immigrants series of which this is the first volume. From January 1846 to June 1847, 85,000 Irish men, women, and children arrived at the port of New York. The passenger lists are arranged by ship and date of arrival in New York, and each person is identified with respect to age, sex, occupation, and family relationships where such was indicated in the original manifests. The extensive index contains all of the passenger names in the text.

The blight that struck the Irish potato crop in the winter of 1845-46 brought ruin to tens of thousands of tenant farmers and laborers, reducing almost all of Ireland to poverty. Making matters worse, very few farmers owned their own land or even held title to their humble dwellings, so when the crop failed they had scarcely any resources to call on. As a result, countless people faced the choice of leaving Ireland or perishing. In fact, between 1846 and 1851, more than a million men, women, and children emigrated to the United States and Canada, mostly through the port of New York.

The information on these people exists in an invaluable series of port arrival records, the Customs Passenger Lists. Until recently, however, these passenger lists were unpublished and only partially indexed and lay well out of the reach of the average researcher, the more so since they are not classified by nationality. To bring those records dealing with Irish immigrants within the range of the researcher, The Famine Immigrants series was conceived for the purpose of enumerating all Irish passengers who entered the port of New York between 1846 and 1851. There are seven volumes in this series.

The passenger lists found in The Famine Immigrants are arranged by ship and date of arrival in New York, and each person is identified with respect to age, sex, occupation, and family relationships where such was indicated in the original manifests. Additionally, every volume boasts of an extensive index containing all of the passenger names in the text.

From April 1851-December 1851, the period covered in this volume, over 85,000 Irish men, women, and children arrived in New York, and all of the data located on them is provided, and their names are all indexed.

Between 1871 and 1910 more than 2.3 million Russian immigrants arrived in the United States, some 600,000 between 1871 and 1898 and 1.7 million between 1899 and 1910. Of the 1.7 million Russian emigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1899 and 1910, 43 percent were Jews, 27 percent Poles, 9 percent Lithuanians, 8 percent Finns, 5 percent Germans, and 4 percent indigenous Russians.

The first six volumes of Migration from the Russian Empirecover the period from January 1875 through June 1891.

Volumes One through Six contain data on hundreds of thousands of persons of Russian nationality who immigrated to the United States from Russian territories. The information was extracted from the original ships' passenger lists held by the Temple-Balch Center for Immigration Research. These passenger lists--customs passenger lists and immigration passenger lists, as they are known--are the only records that furnish proof of the arrival in the United States of all 2.3 million immigrants from the Russian Empire.

Information in the first volume corresponds to the information given in the passenger lists--name of passenger, his age, sex, occupation, country of origin, place of residence, and destination; additionally, each passenger list is headed by the name of the ship, the port of embarkation, the port of arrival, and the date of arrival. By the 1890s, information furnished by the passengers would include their last place of residence in Europe and their precise destination in the U.S.

For researchers investigating their Russian family origins, this type of information is the very bedrock on which all American family history is built.

This second volume in the Russian emigration series extends the coverage by 50,000 names and by three-and-a-half years to April 1886.

Official passenger lists for the port of Charleston--be they Customs Passenger Lists or State Department Transcripts--exist only for the years 1820-1829. This superb new work, compiled by expert South Carolina genealogist Brent Holcomb, captures this unique body of genealogical data on the several thousand people who managed to slip into Charleston through a relatively narrow window of time. Most were from Great Britain and Ireland, and most were young, most were male, and most were unskilled farmers and laborers.

The lists themselves are arranged in the order in which they are found in the original, and all names in the lists are accessible by means of the name index at the back of the volume. The data in each entry, arranged in tabular format, is as follows: name of vessel, name of passenger, age, sex, date of arrival, occupation, where the passenger is from, country to which he belongs, and country which he intends to inhabit.

In the absence of official port records--destroyed by fire in 1940--this ambitious work attempts a reconstruction of passenger arrivals from newspapers and journals. The volume offered here is a reprint of the first volume in a series dealing with passenger arrivals at the port of San Francisco between 1850 and 1875, though this first volume contains a selection of passenger lists extending only though 1864. Interest in the book is inevitably heightened by the fact that the passengers named in the lists came from all parts of the United States, as well as from Europe, though probably the majority were from East Coast points of origin. Here will be found listed approximately 13,500 persons who made the dramatic voyage to the celebrated El Dorado of legend, many of whom were previously the elusive objects of extensive genealogical searches, for some left their homes with hardly a trace, save for the laconic notation in family Bibles and church records: "Gone West."

Typically, each passenger list, from the longest to the shortest, is preceded by the following notations: name of ship, type of ship, port of embarkation, date of arrival, name of captain, description of cargo, and notes concerning the passage, which include date of departure, ports of call, length of voyage, and names of passengers who died en route, with their places of residence and dates of death. The list of passengers follows and sometimes identifies accompanying family members.

"Recommended highly for all genealogical libraries."--The American Genealogist (July 1966)

It is widely known that few ship passenger lists were recorded in the decade prior to 1820 and that reliable information on immigrants of this period is almost beyond reach. Mr. Schlegel's book, however, redresses the balance to some considerable degree.

Deriving from the New York newspaper The Shamrock or Hibernian Chronicle, Passengers from Ireland includes all data published on immigrants during the entire seven-year run of the paper and presents the lists in their original format so that family groupings are readily apparent. In substance, it comprises passenger lists for the whole period 1811 to August 1817, supplying information on over 7,000 travelers.

Data provided with each passenger list include the name of the passenger (sometimes listed with his parish or county of former residence), name of the vessel, name of the ship's captain, length of journey, port of departure, port and date of arrival, and additional remarks concerning such untoward experiences on the high seas as seizure and impressment. Needless to say, such a work goes a long way toward establishing precise information on an ancestor's immigration and answers a great many questions heretofore unanswered.

Few port of departure records in Germany exist for the first fifty years of the 19th century. Nor is there a published collection of passenger lists equivalent to Pennsylvania German Pioneers, Strassburger and Hinke's remarkable work for the 18th century. Faced with these obstacles to the discovery of ancestral links between Old and New Worlds from 1800 to 1860, Germany immigration authority, Clifford Neal Smith, among other things, spent a number of years ferreting out surrogate passenger information from the periodical literature.

Before his death, Smith transcribed the genealogical contents published between 1869 and 1877 in Volumes 1 through 9 of Der Deutsche Pioniere, a monthly magazine issued by the Deutsche Pioniereverein (Union of German Pioneers) founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. (The magazine continued to be published until 1887.) Mr Smith's transcriptions, which were arranged by magazine volume and thereunder in alphabetical order of surname, were originally published in four volumes (issued in six parts) between 1984 and 1991. For the researcher's convenience the component booklets are reprinted here in one volume with six distinct parts.

The author provides the following particulars on each German-American pioneer: name, place of origin in Germany, town or county of residence, reference to the original source, and biographical data provided in the original notice. While most of the early entries pertain to Germanic inhabitants of Ohio, later issues of Der Deutsche Pioniere refer to deceased persons living in Kentucky and neighboring states. By the same token, as genealogy took on greater and greater importance in the magazine, the biographical notes became more copious, providing more information about an individual's life and his/her family members. Taken as a whole, this work provides the German-American researcher with valuable data concerning several thousand individuals whose whereabouts in Germany and the New World might otherwise go unnoticed.

This latest consolidation of works of Clifford Neal Smith encompasses transcriptions or abstracts of emigration notices previously published in six separate booklets. The articles pertain to the following localities: Beihingen am Neckar (Baden-Wuerttemberg), Hamburg and Bremen, Recklinghausen (Nordrhein-Westfalen), Siegkreis (Nordrhein-Westfalen), Kreis Simmern (Hunsrueck), Rheinland-Pfalz, and the Island of Foehr (Schleswig-Holstein). For the most part, these transcriptions span the period 1840 to 1900; however, the Beihingen and especially the Kreis Simmern components refer to 18th-century emigrants. The U.S. was the destination of most, but not all, of these immigrations.

As one might expect in a work of this nature, the source and scope of the information varies. For Beihingen am Neckar, Mr. Smith relied upon a 1939 German-language publication by Albrecht Ritz entitled Gestalten und Ereignisse aus Beihingen am Neckar. The Bremen and Hamburg lists were extracted from the Allgemeine Auswanderungs-Zeitung (German Emigration Newspaper) published in Rudolstadt, Thuringia. On the whole, however, Mr. Smith compiled his information from obscure sources published in German that otherwise would have eluded even the most fastidious researcher. Many of the entries are rather detailed, providing the names of the immigrant, age, occupation, next of kin, sponsors, dates of birth, name of ship, and date of departure. For the most part, researchers can expect to learn the passenger's name, place of origin, number of persons traveling with, and year of departure.

The information in this volume was compiled from the little known Custom House Papers in the Manuscript Department of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and was supplemented by a National Archives microfilm publication containing copies of passenger arrival lists.

The Providence lists from 1798 to 1808 are actually extremely rare Alien Registration Lists, kept in compliance with the Alien Act of 1798. They contain the name of the alien, his age, place of birth, the country he came from, the nation he belonged to and owed allegiance to, his occupation, and a physical description.

The 1820-1872 passenger lists for Providence and Bristol/Warren are Customs Passenger Lists in the possession of the Rhode Island Historical Society--a large percentage of which are actually missing from the National Archives microfilm for the same period of coverage. These lists give the name of the passenger, his age, sex, occupation, the name of the country to which he belonged, and the country which he intended to inhabit.

Altogether about 4,000 persons are listed in the various sections of this work.

The Philadelphia "baggage lists" are the oldest federal passenger lists existing. Compiled in accordance with a law made to exempt in-coming passengers from paying duty on their personal belongings, they provide proof of immigration in the first two decades of the 19th century.

In the lists are the names of the passengers, and in many cases there is data on such items as passengers' ages, nationalities, former places of residence, occupations, destinations, and the names and relationships of accompanying family members. In all there were about 4,767 ship lists with about 40,000 passengers identified--most from Great Britain (especially Northern Ireland) and Germany. For convenience all of the passengers' names have been arranged in a single alphabetical list.

The original lists of emigrants leaving Bremen were destroyed during World War II. However, this work is based on passenger lists of vessels arriving at New York, now in the custody of the National Archives. Not all Bremen passengers of the 1847-1854 period are included--only those for whom a specific place of origin is given, about 35,000 immigrants.

The immigrants' names are arranged in alphabetical order, and family members are grouped together, usually under the head of household. Details concerning age, date of arrival, and the name of the ship are provided, as are specific citations to the original source material.

The second volume of German Immigrants provides information on about 35,000 German immigrants from Bremen who arrived in New York from 1855 to 1862. The names are arranged alphabetically, and family members are grouped together, usually under the head of the household. In addition, data on age, place of origin, date of arrival, and the name of the ship are supplied, plus citations to the original source material.

This is the third volume of the German Immigrants series, this one listing passengers from Bremen to New York between 1863 and September 1867. In effect, it is a partial reconstruction of the Bremen records, based on official passenger lists and manifests in the custody of the National Archives.

Not all of the Bremen passengers of the 1863-1867 period are included in this work--only those for whom a specific place of origin is noted in the manifests. Similar in arrangement to numbers 6580 and 6581 above, this volume provides place of origin information on about 35,000 immigrants.

Following the death of her collaborator Gary Zimmerman, Marion Wolfert has carried on with the German Immigrants series, providing us with the long awaited fourth volume. Similar in all other respects to the previous volumes in the series, this new volume spans the period 1868-1871 and identifies 32,000 German passengers bound from Bremen to New York about whom a specific place of origin is noted in the manifests. For convenience, immigrants' names are arranged in alphabetical order, and family members are grouped together, usually under head of household. In addition, details concerning age, place of origin, date of arrival, and name of ship are provided, as are specific citations to the original source material.