Immigrant Passenger Logs Now Online

Nov. 10, 2006 — A 1921 passenger list from an immigrant ship to the United States describes one traveler as a man with "grayish" hair. His name was Albert Einstein.

Another passenger, arriving to the country in 1881, was listed as riding in the lowest class compartment. He was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s grandfather, Hugh.

These are just a couple of the interesting nuggets that can be gleaned from newly digitized and indexed passenger lists for ships coming to America between 1830 and 1960.

The digitization project contains more than 100 million names and is now searchable online, according to Ancestry.com, a company that provides family history information. The database took three years to complete and represents the largest collection of passenger lists on the Web.

Previously, the lists were scattered around the country at ports, branches of the National Archives, Ellis Island, museums, libraries and at other locations.

Tim Sullivan, CEO of MyFamily.com, Inc, the parent company of Ancestry.com, explained that the online resource makes it much easier for people to search for family members and other information. Most of the data, he said, had been preserved on microfilm.

"The microfilm had a lot of limitations," Sullivan told Discovery News. "It couldn’t come to you; you’d have to go to it, and the lists were not indexed."

Most people will be able to find ancestors within the files, Sullivan points out, since 85 percent of all Americans can trace an ancestor back to the lists.

The files usually include information about accompanying travelers, origin of departure, date and place of arrival and people's intended destinations.

Researchers can also infer the economic status of a traveler, based on how the person traveled during their two-week ride from Europe. The options were first class, second class, or steerage, which were usually horrendous, cramped, smelly quarters.

Actual images of many of the ships and handwritten lists are also viewable online. Since the writing was often difficult to decipher, 1,500 paleographers required more than 1.8 million hours over the three-year period to index and catalog the collection.

Immigration to the United States began after the Mayflower’s arrival in 1620. Data from 1620-1820 was not included in the project because it wasn’t until 1819 that Congress passed a law requiring ships docking at American ports to document all passengers and crew. After 1960, most individuals arrived by plane.

For individuals who did travel by ship between 1820 and 1960, the major ports of arrival were New York, Boston, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Sullivan and his team determined that major ports of departure in Europe were Liverpool, England; Bremen, Germany; Naples, Italy; Antwerp, Belgium; and Hamburg, Germany.

While working on the lists, the paleographers discovered interesting tidbits about politicians and celebrities.

Besides Einstein’s arrival and Sen. Clinton’s grandfather, there is the entry about escape artist Harry Houdini. Houdini had recently been outed as a spy for Scotland Yard and the U.S. Secret Service. Ship records show he traveled on the same ship as former president Theodore Roosevelt in 1914. They were sailing to New York from Southampton, England.

And that iconic homemaker Martha Stewart’s immigrant grandfather was, according to the S. S. Iceland manifest, a professional "basket maker," suggesting craftiness runs in Stewart’s family genes.

Wendy Bebout Elliott, president of the Federation of Genealogical Societies and a professor of history at California State University Fullerton, said the lists can offer a bounty of information about people’s heritage.

"Passenger lists tell us who came with whom, how old they were when they came, and where they came from," she said. "It gives you occupation information and tells you if there was someone here that they were meeting and more."

The information will be free to all Ancestry.com visitors through at least the end of this month. It is also available for free at many public libraries and LDS Family History libraries nationwide.