If you are just Beginning the hunt for your family There is another section of my web for you, it is the course I teach to people who are just trying to figure out how to use their computer and the internet to find their ancestors click here for how to begin
How to find your immigrant ancestor
#1 You may think you know how to spell the name you are searching for but take a moment to see how my name is spelled in just one data base Rader spelled 44 ways and most of them no longer exist in this country !
#2 Where should you look ? Have you analyzed all of those competing Immigrant record data bases. Click here to see my analysis
#3 Which file is the most complete ? The first place that I recommend for finding an immigrant is PASSENGER AND IMMIGRATION LISTS INDEX, A guide to Published Arrival Records of about 3,050,000 passengers Who came to the United States and Canada in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries. They estimate that there have been over 35,000,000 immigrants who came to the New World.
This work by P. William Filby with Mary K Meyer
now available either
1. on the web (click on picture below)
for samples of International records from the above site click here
2. CD-ROM electronic from above on the left
or
2. in book form from:
- Gale Research, Passenger and Immigration List Index
- 645 Griswold St.
- Detroit, MI 48226-4094
- phone (313) 961-2242, (800) 347-4253, fax (313) 961-6741
It consists of a first edition consisting of 3 volumes plus yearly supplements. The 1988 and 1989 volumes consist of two volumes. These large books are about the same size as a volume of a set of encyclopedias. The author has added a yearly Supplement each year since 1982. There are over 15 supplements with the original three volumes make a set the size of Encyclopedias.
The primary sources for the first 3 volumes of this work was:
- Bibliography of Ship Passenger Lists, 1538-1825: Being a guide to Published Lists of Early Immigrants to North America (third edition revised by Richard J. Wolfe, New York: New York Public Library, 1963)
- #4 Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild
- http://istg.rootsweb.com
- #5 Tracing Your Immigrant Ancestors Back to the "Old Country" http://www.rootsweb.com/~rwguide/lesson15.htm
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Have you used the CENSUS to find your immigrant? It is not unusual for family from the old country to come to them generations later. Check out the results from one census index search