When
Did Your Family’s Ship Come In?
By Mary Alice Dell
When did your ancestors arrive in America? When and why your family came to this country
shaped your life. Your ancestors not
only gave you their genes and personality traits, their decisions affected many
aspects of your life today. Their
arrival is an important date in your family history.
If your family came prior to the American Revolution, you
may have trouble finding information that tells you exactly when and on what
ship unless they were early settlers in New England or early immigrants into Pennsylvania coming from the area that is now Germany. Since all immigrants who were not English
citizens had to take an oath pledging allegiance to the King, many records
exist of those foreign oath takers.
Although the captains of arriving ships had to give a list
of their passengers to the port master, unfortunately, not all survived. Finding the book that has the extracted list
with your ancestor’s name is a daunting task. A series of books with indexes to
sources of these passenger and immigration lists of the 16th, 17th
and 18th centuries have been published by William Filby and Mary K. Meyers.
These books are available in many large libraries.
Volunteers Can Help Find Ship List
If your ancestor came after 1820, your chances are better
for locating the ship and date of his arrival if he came into Castle Garden
in New York City. These passenger lists are available as a
searchable data base on Ancestry.com, a subscription website. You can access this site free in the Genealogical/Historical Room at the Boerne Public
Library thanks to the Genealogical Society of Kendall County who funds the
Library subscription. GSKC volunteers
staff the library most times from 9-12 and 1-4 Monday through Friday, to help
visitors research their family history in the Library or on the Internet.
The odds are in your favor of finding information, if your
ancestor arrived at Ellis Island after it
opened in 1892. This database is a free
site, but using the index can be tricky.
The secret is to use a variety of spellings of the name you are
researching. The URL for the site is
www.ellisisland.org. Using the Steve
Morse Gold Index to Ellis Island
(www.stevemorse.org) will often give more positive results.
If your family came into the Texas
area in the 1840’s, passengers lists are available for ships arriving at Galveston and New
Orleans. These lists, and several books with extracted
passenger lists into other port, are also in the genealogy collection at the
Library.
If you have a genealogy question that you would like
answered in this column, or privately, send it to me by email or to the Boerne
Star office.
Published in the Boerne Star & Recorder March 16,
2007 and reprinted here with their permission.