Italian Immigration

Italian Immigrants
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-87554

Italians Americans make up the fourth largest European ethnic groups in the US. Most Italian
immigration happened between 1880 and 1915 when about four million Italians emigrated to America.

The National Archives provides easy access to some Italian immigration records through the Italians to America Passenger Data File, 1855-1900. This collection consists of an index of 845,368 passengers who arrived in Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia between 1855-1900. The Data File includes information about passenger's name, age, town of last residence, destination, and gives you information on finding the ship's manifest.

After you find your ancestor's town of birth, visit Ancestors: Archives for Genealogical Research which is the official portal to the various State Archives in Italy. And don't forget to search for church records. The Italian Catholic Church website can help you locate your ancestor's parish church. 

German Immigrants from Bremen

About forty percent of 19th century immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe left through the city of Bremen. German ports typically kept records of emigrants leaving for America and elsewhere; unfortunately, the emigration lists from Bremen were destroyed during World War II. German Immigrants: Lists of Passengers Bound from Bremen to New York compiled by Gary J. Zimmerman attempts to reconstruct these lists.

Based on passenger lists of arrivals at New York, German Immigrants includes information on about 35,000 immigrants spanning the dates between 1847 and 1871. This is still only about twenty-five percent of the total number of emigrants from Bremen arriving during this period.

This series spans four volumes and includes details such as age, place of origin, date of arrival, and the name of the ship, as well as citations to the original source material.

German Immigrants is a good starting point for finding your German immigrant ancestors.

Name Changes at Ellis Island

One of the most common stories in American family lore is that officials at Ellis Island changed an
immigrant ancestor's name. It's a persistent myth and one that isn't true.

For the 125th anniversary of the opening of Ellis Island, Smithsonian.com examines the history of immigration in the US and explains the truth about immigration officials and names. Here are a few key points from the article:

Ellis Island inspectors were not responsible for recording immigrants’ names. Instead, any error likely happened overseas.

At the shipping line’s station in Europe, a clerk wrote the passenger’s name in the ship’s manifest, sometimes without asking for identification verifying the spelling.

The ship’s manifest was presented to Ellis Island inspectors after the boat docked. From there, the inspector would cross-reference the name on the manifest with the immigrant passenger, and also ask 30 questions to screen out rabble-rousers, loafers, or the physically and mentally infirm, but also to glean information on who they would be living with and where in America, says Urban. The inspectors also would see if the answers matched those recorded by the shipping clerk before departure.

“If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists,” says Philip Sutton, a librarian in the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, at the New York Public Library, in a blog post delving into the name change mythology.

More commonly, immigrants themselves would change their names, either to sound more American, or to melt into the immigrant community, where they were going to live, says Sutton. If name changes happened with any frequency on Ellis Island, it was not noted in any contemporaneous newspaper accounts or in recollections from inspectors, Sutton says. 

It is also unlikely a foreign name would flummox an Ellis Island inspector. From 1892 to 1924, “one-third of all immigrant inspectors were themselves foreign-born, and all immigrant inspectors spoke an average of three languages,” says the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

Read the entire article to learn more about immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Two Centuries of US Immigration

Here's an interactive map highlighting two centuries of immigration to the US. It's interesting to watch the changing patterns of immigration from Western Europe to Eastern Europe to eventually the Americas and Asia. You can find more graphs and visualization of US immigration here.

Understanding the history of immigration to the US is an important part of researching your immigrant ancestors. Knowing immigration patterns can help you determine when and perhaps why your ancestor emigrated to America. 

German Emmigration

A great resource for finding information on German emigrants is the Deutsche Auswanderer-Datenbank (German Emigrants Database) at the Historisches Museum Bremerhaven. This project collects information on emigration to the United States. The main focus of the database is on European emigrants who left from German ports.

The German Emigrants Database collects passenger manifests principally between 1820-1897 and 1904-1907. The site also studies European emigration to the US and collects information about German emigrant ships.

You can search online for the names of emigrants in their collections or the Friends of the Museum Association will also perform searches for you for a fee.

Filby's Passenger and Immigration Lists Index

Beginning in 1820, the US government ordered that all ship manifests and passenger lists be handed over to customs officials upon arrival in the country. These records are held by the National Archives and are available to search on Ancestry.

If your ancestor arrived in America before 1820, finding passenger lists becomes more difficult. Often you must rely on print resources to find these early immigration records.

One of the best resources for these passenger lists is Passenger and Immigration Lists Index by P. William Filby (often just referred to as 'Filby's').  This is an index to published immigration lists found in periodicals or reference books. Supplements to the original three volume index are published annually.

Filby's now contains over five million records. You must search the original three volume set and each supplemental volume which can be time consuming--but is well worth the effort! Filby's may seem intimidating but it is actually easy to use.

To use Filby's, search for your ancestor's name. Each volume is arranged alphabetically by last name and each entry may include a birthdate, the port entry and the date of entry. There will also be a source identification number and page number. Once you find your ancestor, make a note of the source and page number. At the front of the volume, you'll find all of the print resources listed by their source number. You can find some of these resources in the Glenview Public Library. The others you can locate with WorldCat.

For example, I search for Alexander Sessions and find him listed in one of the volumes. The information I find shows that Alexander Sessions arrived in Massachusetts in 1677. The source number is 3274 and the page number is 213.

Next, I search for source number 3274 at the front of the volume. 3274 is the number for the book: Directory of the Ancestral Heads of New England Families. I will find Alexander Sessions on page 213 of this book.

Class On Immigration

They Became American: Finding Ancestral Origins
Saturday, November 13, 2010 : 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
National Archives At Chicago 7358 S Pulaski Rd., Chicago, IL 60629-5834 (773) 948-9000

Critical clues may be found in naturalization records, a photograph, in an archive or even in someone‟s attic. Renowned author and genealogist, Loretto Szucs, will focus on some fascinating sources for finding more precise information on your ancestors‟ origins in this workshop.

Locating Old Newspapers

Often, obituaries of our immigrant ancestors will be found in ethnic newspapers.

One way to locate microfilm of old newspapers is by using WorldCat.. through the Library's website.

Search for the name of a town as a subject, and the keywords newspapers and the name of an ethnic group. Remember to click on limit type to "serial publications."

Here is the result of a sample search for Chicago (Ill.) Polish newspapers.

Click on Libraries Worldwide to see which libraries have the newspaper you need.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

The USCIS Genealogy Program is a fee-for-service program providing family historians and other researchers with timely access to historical immigration and naturalization records.

The Program offers two services:

1--Index Search: Using biographical information provided by the researcher, USCIS searches its historical immigration and naturalization record indices for citations related to a specific immigrant. Search results (record citations) are returned to the researcher, along with instructions on how to request the file(s) from USCIS or the National Archives. Fee: $20.00.

2--Record Copy Request: Researchers with valid record citations (USCIS file numbers), gained through a USCIS Genealogy Program index search or through independent research, may request copies of historical immigration and naturalization records. Fee: $20.00/$35.00

(depending on the record type). Records can include Naturalization Certificate Files, Alien Registration Forms, Visa files, Registry Files, and Alien Files.

Due to the tremendous number of requests received when this program became available, they are currently still answering requests received in mid-February 2009 or earlier.

Along the right column of the web page you will find importqant links to detailed information, including a list of Frequently Asked Questions about this service, and how to make a genealogy request.

New World Immigrants

New genealogy book at the Glenview Public Library:

New World immigrants : a consolidation of ship passenger lists and associated data from periodical literature / edited by Michael Tepper.
R929.373 NEW GENEALOGY v. 1 and 2

This work is a collection of ninety-seven articles from some fifty periodicals, mostly totally unknown to the researcher. Within the general time frame 1618-1878, the articles identify upwards of 27,500 emigrants, mainly English, Irish, Scottish, German, Swiss, French, Dutch, Norwegian, and Russian-German.

Most of the work focuses on passenger lists of the pre-Revolutionary period. The entire first volume is given over to the hundred-year period 1618 to 1718. The 19th century is represented by 15 articles. The period before the advent of the official U.S. Customs Passenger Lists in 1820 is generously represented.

The New York Times' Immigration Explorer shows historic immigration patterns in the United States. You can see where different ethnic groups settled. The interactive map is an excellent use of aggregate data from U.S. Census and geographic information systems.

Genealogy at USCIS

The Genealogy Program of the U. S. Citizenship and Immigratiion Services is a fee-for-service program providing family historians and other researchers with timely access to historical immigration and naturalization records.

you can submit orders online!

Records available through the USCIS Genealogy Program:
Naturalization Certificate Files (C-files) from September 27, 1906 to April 1, 1956
Alien Registration Forms from August 1, 1940 to March 31, 1944
Visa files from July 1, 1924 to March 31, 1944
Registry Files from March 2, 1929 to March 31, 1944
Alien Files (A-files) numbered below 8 million (A8000000) and documents therein dated prior to May 1, 1951

New genealogy book: "Transatlantic Voyages, 1600-1699"

This is a new genealogy book at the Glenview Public Library:

R929.34 DOB GENEALOGY - Transatlantic voyages 1600-1699.2nd ed., by David Dobson. Clearfield, 2008.

(Annotation from www.genealogical .com)
"Virtually no official European passenger records exist for the 17th century. Fortunately, scholars like Peter Wilson Coldham have been able to reconstruct English passenger lists from shipping records in various British archives and libraries. Although the nations of northwestern Europe established shipping links with North America and the West Indies as early as the 1600s, records of those voyages are fragmented and scattered throughout archives on both sides of the Atlantic.
The new book by colonial immigration authority David Dobson brings together evidence of voyages from Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Channel Islands to North America and the West Indies during the 17th century. Using primary and secondary sources in Europe and America, Mr. Dobson has compiled evidence of voyages between the aforementioned countries and America--in either direction--from 1600 through 1699. We know that many of the vessels cited were in fact the ones taken by early European settlers of colonial America. The ports of origin in Europe identified by the compiler may well indicate the localities whence the first emigrants originated and, therefore, places where genealogical research may be conducted. The record entries are arranged alphabetically and give the name of the ship and its captain, ports of embarkation and/or arrival, dates, the source of the information, and a few high seas anecdotes.

Since the publication of the first edition of Transatlantic Voyages in 2004, Mr. Dobson has uncovered many more voyages and vessels. This expanded edition lists nearly 1,400 transatlantic voyages--20% more than in the original."