Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon

Using the Jewish Page on the Ellis Island Database

Excerpt from Avotaynu's "Nu, What's New

http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/EIDB provides functionality that does not exist in the SLEIF system. Using the Ellis Island Database (Jewish Passengers) you can:

1. Search first and/or last name using the Daitch-Mokotoff soundex system. Soundex searching which solves a host of misspelling problems that exist in the database.  

2. Search first and/or last name by contained strings (e.g., searching for all last names that contain "berg", or that contain "koto" and finding "Mokotoff"). 

3. Search by town (including starts with, sounds like, or
   contains functionality).

4. Search by year of birth. The Main Morse search form relies on the limited ability of the Ellis Island database to search by range of age at time of arrival. It is more likely that the searcher knows the approximate year of birth and approximate year of arrival. The ability to search by year of birth is a very valuable feature because it allows you to
   restrict the number of hits considerably. For example, if you know that an ancestor was born between 1880 and 1885 and arrived at Ellis Island between 1900 and 1910, using the limited Ellis Island database functionality, you would need to compute his age at arrival as between 15 (1900-1885) and 30 (1910-1880). That 15 year span will produce many false hits. But if insteadyou entered his year of birth which had only a 5 year span, you will get many fewer hits.

5. Search by marital status.

6. Specify the number of hits per page. The New Format function on the Main Morse page, developed by Yves Goulnik, provides comparable function, but only for four values: 25, 50, 75, and 100.  The Jewish form lets you enter any value you want so you can see all your hits at once, even if it is in the thousands.

7. Search by arrival day and/or month. The Main Morse search form only allows you to search by arrival year.

8. Specify any port name. The Main Morse search form only has a partial set of ports from which you must chose. Ability to search for ports by leading characters or by contained strings.

9. Search for ship's name by leading characters.  The Main Morse search form requires that you specify the name of the boat exactly, and even then you might not get a match because of the way the boat keys were entered in the database.

10. Search for town of ancestry for any immigrant ethnic
    group.